There is a new front in the return-to-office battle. Some companies are not just stiffening their mandates but are increasingly monitoring attendance and using the data gathered in performance and pay reviews.
After several years of employees calling the shots on working habits, especially when the labour market was tight, bosses are seeking to exert more influence.
“Companies are getting more prescriptive,” including linking pay and promotions to the return to the office, said Maria Colacurcio, chief executive of Syndio, a pay software company. “I am noticing it.”
Lloyds Banking Group, for example, is keeping a hybrid working policy but will take into account the office attendance of senior executives when awarding their bonuses. PwC has said it will monitor attendance and send staff and their career coaches data on their locations every month.
While overall working from home levels have remained steady since late 2023, according to research by Prof Nick Bloom, a Stanford University economist, return-to-office mandates have been gradually building. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Amazon are among those to have recently called staff back to the office five days a week. But mandates are not always strictly enforced.
That is now starting to change. Companies are able to more rigidly enforce workplace policies partly because they have more data to work with. Turnstile information, computer monitor activity numbers and human resources technology are helping them better understand how workers are spending their time and how they are performing compared with one another.
Bernie Mehl, co-founder of Kisi, which provides software to track office use, said companies are using this information to calculate office costs but are also increasingly looking to tie it into their HR programmes. The data provided a way “to measure adherence to return-to-office policies and, if contractually required, make this information part of the performance review”, he added. It also informed orders for lunches, timing for cleaners and meeting room use.
One customer, Kargo, a mobile advertising company with 600 staff, offers different working patterns depending on seniority.
The senior leadership team is expected in the office daily to co-ordinate around strategy and policies. Directors and vice-presidents should come in to mentor and collaborate with their team, but more junior contributors can be more flexible. Founder Harry Kargman said the company was considering using data in performance reviews. “If goals are achieved and [staff] don’t come in, fine. How can I say ‘come into the office more’? But if they don’t hit their goals, we will ask what they need to do differently.”
Companywide mandates tend to be a feature of large employers, added Kargman, because they do not have the “speed and agility to adapt. They take a more hardline approach to create uniformity – and, from the senior management’s perspective, fairness”.
More rigid approaches have sometimes coincided with employers tightening spending, reducing costs or cutting jobs, prompting some staff to claim that strictly enforced return-to-office mandates are redundancies in disguise.
After UK-based advertising group WPP last month told its more than 100,000 employees they would need to be in the office at least four days a week, one employee told the Financial Times the company was “trying to encourage some people to leave the business or give WPP [a reason] to terminate the contract without paying redundancy ... They have said that if you don’t fulfil the requirements, you will be subject to disciplinary procedures”.
WPP said employees would be able to request flexibility, particularly those with caring duties and health problems and those who have historically been remote.
The risk for employers is that while return-to-office mandates could help weed out some underperforming staff, they could also push away valued workers.
Last year, a research paper produced by David Van Dijcke, an economics researcher at the University of Michigan, and others found anecdotal evidence that the stricter the return-to-office rules, “the stronger the effect on people leaving”, with top managers most at risk.
It cited increased attrition levels at Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX after their return-to-office mandates were tightened.
Nearly half of employed adults (46 per cent) who could work from home would be unlikely to stay in their role if their employer forced them into the office, according to Pew Research.
A study on office mandates by Gartner, the human resources consultancy, found that “high performers, women and millennials, three groups that prize flexibility, are the biggest flight risks”.
In practice, this means that even the strictest rules can be bent, often to favour higher performers and more senior, hard to replace, executives.
Korn Ferry, the consultancy, has identified a “hybrid hierarchy”, whereby highly-valued employees are given more dispensation to work flexibly than colleagues, forming a two-tier workforce.
Brian Elliott, chief executive of Work Forward, a consultancy advising on flexible ways of working, said: “Managers are stuck between a rock and a hard place: increased demands to do more with less run up against the potential loss of productive employees or certainly the loss of engagement. Side deals get struck: as long as you continue to perform, I’ll look the other way.”
Some companies are offering overseas placements as a perk to sweeten their mandates, according to Claire Pepper, a partner at Vialto, an employee mobility company.
Kargman added that incentives were more effective than punishment. His company offers free snacks, lunch and education. Junior staff who have the most latitude to work from home have high attendance, bolstered by a desire for mentorship.
“The bottom line is we want to provide flexibility as it’s a perk. At the same time, we want to create an environment where people want to come in.”
Companies that strictly apply attendance rules are entering a legal grey area, according to lawyers.
Tim Gilbert, head of employment at Travers Smith, said it could be risky for employers to use bonuses to incentivise office attendance.
“If a corporate says, ‘You won’t get a full bonus if you’re not in five days a week’, you could get yourself into equal pay or discrimination territory.” The risk is that they may be exposed to claims if, for example, those with young children or disabled staff cannot come into the office as frequently and are not paid the same as someone doing the same job who is in five days a week.
“We’re getting more calls on it, more requests from clients to have discussions,” said Gilbert.
Katy Salt, head of the legal advice service at the charity Working Families, advised employers to think about the legal implications.
“Returning to the office is a complex area of employment law, which largely depends on individual circumstances. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, and various legal protections may overlap.” For example, employees may be protected under legislation due to factors such as sex or disability. It may breach the contract if working from home was explicitly stated.
Aside from the legal factors, employers should also be aware of a more simple matter: demotivating staff, according to Debbie Lovich at consultancy BCG. “Nothing says I don’t trust you like a mandate with badge swipes monitoring your every move,” she warned. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
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