Employers are ditching remote work. Experts worry that’s shortsighted.

It took a few years for the winds to shift, but employers began in earnest in 2024 to reverse course on their openness to flexible work. Return-to-office plans proliferated last year, with 58% of surveyed U.S. workers working fully on-site compared to 53% in 2023, according to McKinsey & Co.

Now that trend is spilling over into employers’ recruiting efforts: the latest edition of HR Dive’s annual Identity of HR survey, which polled 578 HR professionals, found that fewer than half, 48%, said remote or hybrid work arrangements were part of their organizations’ talent acquisition strategies last year, compared to 56% in 2023’s survey.

HR Dive’s findings match up with broader industry sentiment, said Jamie Kohn, senior director, research at consulting firm Gartner. Despite strong demand for flexibility from candidates, HR teams are largely restricted from meeting that demand because of a shift by leadership toward RTO, she added.

“They kind of feel like their hands are tied by leadership decisions,” Kohn said. “It’s still a critical factor from the candidate side, but we’re definitely seeing that factor less in offers, and it’s still not being used as much as a carrot to attract talent.”

It’s a striking — if not foreseeable — trend after some studies in the years immediately following 2020 suggested that employers would settle on at least some degree of work location flexibility as a long-term strategy. But as far back as 2021, Kohn said she recalled having conversations with finance professionals who planned to push RTO when the then-candidate-friendly talent market cooled.

In 2025, the share of HR clients asking Kohn to help them make the business case for remote work has dropped considerably; “They’re not really asking for that anymore,” she said.

To the extent that organizations have made changes, “9 out of 10 of those cases is a pull back on remote work as opposed to an expansion,” said Bradford Bell, professor in strategic human resources at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. In addition to reversing policies on where people work, employers also have increased requirements on how far employees may live from a worksite, he added.

Bell said a number of firms may have wished to change course sooner following the pandemic but simply couldn’t given the leverage held by candidates for the past several years. The growing number of hiring pauses, hiring slowdowns and layoffs has changed that calculus, however, as have long-running concerns about productivity and company culture.

Employer-friendly talent market a ‘flawed’ basis for RTO

Still, a large share of HR teams see value in meeting candidate demand for flexibility, Kohn said. She noted the example of companies such as Spotify, whose prominent Times Square advertisement declared that “employees aren’t children” as it displayed that company’s intent to continue remote work.

According to results viewed by HR Dive, Gartner’s survey of HR leaders in 2024’s fourth quarter found that the share of respondents who agreed that on-site work requirements made it more difficult to attract skilled talent dropped to a 78% majority from 93% in that year’s second quarter.

“Over time, companies are going to settle into more one camp or the other,” on remote work, Kohn said. “I do think it will come back to some extent, especially as the market continues to get more competitive for some roles.”

Bell said he questioned the rationale behind basic RTO decisions on talent market dynamics alone, given that a future swing in favor of employees could end up causing recruiting issues for employers down the road. “The short-term logic strikes me,” Bell continued, noting that current employees may be enticed to look for more remote-friendly jobs, especially if they feel that RTO is being imposed arbitrarily.

“If a company is really not offering flexible- or remote-work options, I think it’s really imperative on the company to explain why or why not,” he said. A strong case could be made for seeking a collaborative culture or creating an environment in which new employees can better integrate with the rest of the organization, “but I think a lot of times these decisions seem a lot more arbitrary,” Bell said. “It creates a sense of unfairness or a lack of understanding.”

Employers also could take into account what their immediate competitors are doing on the subject of flexibility, among other things. At the most basic level, however, HR should work with leadership to determine what the best operating model is for the organization and the job types therein, Bell said, which can help put into place a clear case for in-person or flexible work that candidates can take into account regardless of market conditions.

“Capitalizing on our leverage is probably a shortsighted and flawed mode of thinking,” Bell said. “Think about what’s best for us.”

Think about when, not just where employees work

Flexibility often revolves around discussions of work location, but it can be just as important to consider schedule flexibility as a potential appeal to talent, Kohn said, particularly for front-line workers who cannot work remotely.

Results from Gartner’s 2024 Voice of the Candidate Survey found that while 24% of job candidates cited location flexibility as a factor that led them to select a job offer, a higher share, 35%, said the same of time-based flexibility. That finding suggests employers should consider what they might be able to offer in terms of flexibility even if RTO policies have taken hold at their organizations, Kohn said; “this can be a good way to approach it.”

HR also should continue to monitor the effect that a lack of flexibility has on recruiting, where applicable, Kohn continued. Leaders should be able to provide data on how many candidates and employees an organization has lost because of RTO. Even if the employer assumes some degree of candidate loss because of in-office requirements, those effects may not be felt evenly across all job types, especially within high-demand roles.

“Maybe we’re allowing some sort of talent loss as a result of this change, but especially as companies are trying to compete for tech talent, AI and digital transformation, it’s really important to know and to be able to size what the talent costs are,” Kohn said.

Articulate the ‘why’ for RTO — and make it transparent

In-office requirements may create a number of headaches for employees, from a sudden lack of toilet paper or dip in Wi-Fi quality to the resumption of long commutes in a car-dependent country with few quality alternatives.

Yet, one emerging issue concerns the way in which hybrid work options are reserved only for certain categories of workers or executives. That possibility is giving way to concerns about the potential for “hybrid hierarchy” to flourish within organizations, according to a recent Korn Ferry report. The term describes employers that give work-location flexibility to top candidates, top performers or top leaders but not others.

Concerns about such stratification are not necessarily new, though. In fact, hierarchical approaches to remote work were common among pre-pandemic organizations, Bell said, and flexibility was then a way to reward high-potential and high-performance talent.

“The difference now is that you have such a large proportion of the workforce working remotely and, in some sense, maybe viewing it as an entitlement that I think that hierarchy may be much more salient,” Bell added, which can create more issues. 

One way to approach potential pitfalls is to create an explicit, transparent policy on who has access to flexible work and how employees can earn that access, Kohn said. “If it’s something that is given out as a privilege indiscriminately, then that’s where I think we have challenges,” she added. “If that flexibility is something you can earn and we can understand how to do that, I think it can make sense.”

As part of that process, employers should consider how and where decisions are made as to how many days a week employees must work in-office, Kohn said. That is likely to involve extensive discussions with managers and team leaders to determine what works best for them, and HR can equip managers with explainers on those decisions to help them avoid RTO-related conflict with direct reports.

Beyond coming up with a rationale for RTO or flexibility, employers will need to cite data or other evidence to back up their decisions, Bell said. He advised HR to go beyond vague leadership statements on the value of in-office work to make the case to candidates and employees that a shift is worth doing.

That said, allowing individual managers to decide what RTO approach is best for their team, rather than articulating a top-down policy, “is the worst possible approach,” Bell said. “I think that was the default approach early on post-pandemic and I think most companies have realized that that does not work well.”

Instead, employers should have clear guidelines and a clear rationale around who has location flexibility and why; this can allow managers to have input without creating the kind of disparities that may fracture an organization, he added. HR can consider multiple factors, such as the degree of contact with customers that a given position may have, an employee’s past track record and performance, and the effect of remote work on different teams within the organization.