Five years since the pandemic began, workers have grown accustomed to a script. Their bosses make return-to-office plans, which then get shelved. And then shelved again.
In recent weeks, the calls to end remote work have come back with gusto, and with authority.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal department heads to “terminate remote work arrangements” and require all federal workers to return to in-person work five days a week. He previewed the move in December when he said those federal workers who refused to go into the office were “going to be dismissed.”
Some chief executives, who have long been enthusiastic about ditching remote work, have also announced full return-to-office plans. Amazon, JPMorgan and AT&T told many employees they would have to be back in the office five days a week this year. Even in popular culture, the office is making a comeback, with “Babygirl” glamorizing the blouse wearing C.E.O., “Severance” returning for a new season probing corporate psychological drama, and buzzy newsletters like “Feed Me” declaring remote work “out.”
And some workers, who have come back to in-person work of their own volition, are eager to pick up their prepandemic work routines.
Two years ago, Ellen Harwick would have said she wanted to work remotely forever. Last fall, a switch flipped.
A marketing manager for an apparel brand in Bellingham, Wash., Ms. Harwick worked remotely for two weeks in Portugal while still working on Pacific time. Suddenly, she began to crave office chatter.
“Something just shifted for me,” said Ms. Harwick, 48. “Working from home was really novel for the first bit, and then I just felt isolated.” She is now back in the office five days a week.
But many proponents of remote work, who underscore the benefits it offers to people with caregiving responsibilities, voiced concern about flexibility evaporating entirely.
“It’s very challenging to find child care that allows you to be in the office 9 to 5,” said Sara Mauskopf, the chief executive and founder of Winnie, a start-up that connects families with child care providers. Her company is fully remote.
Amazon’s return to office began on Jan. 2, when the company instructed most workers to come in five days a week, up from the three days required as of May 2023. In some locations, the deadline has been postponed as the company reconfigures office space. Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, told employees in a memo that returning to the office would better allow workers to “invent, collaborate and be connected” to one another and to the company culture.
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Mr. Jassy wrote.
JPMorgan told employees that in-person work would support better mentorship and brainstorming. The company will start rolling out its return to office in March.
“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan wrote in a memo to employees. “We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach.”
Many work force experts point out that executives have wanted people back in the office for a while, for the purposes of building culture and relationships. What has changed, they say, is that employers feel they have more leverage now that the labor market is not quite as tight as it was at the height of the Great Resignation, when there were more open jobs for the number of unemployed people.
“It becomes like another dimension of compensation — in a really tight labor market, employees get their way more, employers might not pressure them to come back because they might want to quit,” said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University. “In a labor market where there’s more slack, employers might be less worried about that.”
Sometimes a return-to-office push has less to do with building an office culture and more to do with cost. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who studies remote work and advises executives on hybrid arrangements, said he had seen some companies press employees to return to the office as a way to reduce head count, understanding that calling all workers back would encourage some to quit.
“The waning of the D.E.I. movement has made it a bit easier,” added Mr. Bloom, referencing the backlash to corporate diversity initiatives, and explaining that women and employees of color have tended to voice more support for remote work in surveys.
In spite of these high-profile efforts to get workers back five days a week, many other employers are holding on to a hybrid approach.
Data from a Stanford project tracking work-from-home rates shows that over one-quarter of paid full days in the United States are worked remotely. And about three-quarters of Americans whose jobs can be done remotely continue to work from home some of the time, according to Pew.
One of the reasons that hybrid work has remained so sticky is that workers have made clear their preference for flexibility. Nearly half of remote workers surveyed by Pew said they would consider leaving their jobs if their employers no longer allowed them some remote flexibility. At Amazon, corporate workers staged a walkout in May 2023 protesting R.T.O. Some employers said they had no plans to change course from hybrid arrangements.
“We are committed to providing flexibility to the work force and believe the hybrid-flex approach allows teams to collaborate intentionally,” said Claire Borelli, the chief people officer at TIAA, an investment firm that called its employees back to the office three days a week in March 2022.
Some remote work stalwarts say that the policy has had no impact on productivity and that it has helped employee retention. When Yelp’s lease came up for renewal in 2021, the company decided to shift locations and sublease a smaller space from Salesforce. The company now allows employees to work fully remotely, bucking broader return-to-office trends.
“At this point, we almost drop the descriptor of remote work — it’s just the way we work,” said Carmen Amara, the company’s chief people officer.
Ms. Amara said any skepticism the company faced over its remote policy went away because of bottom-line results. The company reported record net revenue and profitability in the last quarter of 2024, as well as a 13 percent decrease in turnover since 2021.
But with big names like Amazon and JPMorgan returning to the office in full force, and with President Trump insisting that the federal work force do the same, the commercial real estate industry is tentatively optimistic, according to Ruth Colp-Haber, the chief executive of Wharton Property Advisors, a real estate brokerage.
Office occupancy is still shaky — a little over half of what it was prepandemic — according to Kastle, a workplace security firm whose “return-to-office” barometer has reflected the ups and downs of remote work since 2020. But that is up from what it was in 2022.
“These things take a while to work their way into the numbers, but there’s no question the momentum is on the positive side,” Ms. Colp-Haber said. “For a variety of reasons, one of them being the push by big companies to have five days a week back in the office, we’re seeing greater demand for office space.”
