These remote workers were ordered back to the office. They still work from home.

Employers are calling workers back to the office. But are they complying?

New research suggests some people are defying their bosses’ marching orders even as the job market cools and job anxieties mount.

The average number of days employees are required to be in the office rose 12% over the past year, but office attendance showed an increase of just 1% to 3%, according to Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward and publisher of the Flex Index, which produced the report. 

“The harsh return to the office mandate is like the law against jaywalking. It exists, everybody knows about it and nobody obeys it because it makes little sense,” said Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, who studies remote work.

Showing up in the office five days a week was the norm until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down offices across America.

With millions forced to work from home, commutes and cubicles faded into the rearview as the flexibility of remote work caught on. Even as offices reopened, many workers continued logging in from home offices or worked a hybrid schedule two to three days a week. 

Then came the rush of return-to-office mandates. “So many companies got a whiff of people actually feeling a slightly better work-life balance doing WFH (work from home) and decided joy was not part of the benefit package,” one worker commented on Reddit. 

Employers see it differently. They say the pandemic-era isolation undercut collaboration and innovation that only comes from in-person interactions.

When JPMorgan Chase put the kibosh on flexible, hybrid schedules this year, CEO Jamie Dimon forcefully defended the move, saying returning to the office five days a week was essential to mentor new employees and foster company culture.

The new mandates were not popular with everyone. Morale took a hit at JPMorgan and elsewhere. 

Sounding off in surveys and on social media, unhappy workers ticked off the downsides of the forced migration back to the office − and not just the fluorescent lighting, cramped cubicles, smelly food in the microwave or annoying coworkers.

Long commutes increase stress and reduce productivity. The daily costs of in-office attendance − an average of $61 a day when hybrid workers are in the office, according to video conferencing firm Owl Labs’ 2024 State of Hybrid Work − take a bite out of family budgets.

Some contend that going into the office defeats the purpose with many teams spread out across cities and time zones. Then there’s the impossible task of squeezing doctor’s appointments and child care pick-ups into 9-to-5 office schedules, especially for working mothers.

Smarting from the new status quo, some remote workers forced back to the office say they no longer put in the extra effort and are reclaiming their time instead.

"I’m arriving exactly at (the) scheduled start, taking every lunch break away from my desk and leaving the second my day is over. You want to reach me via email or ping after hours? That’s too damn bad," one person wrote on Reddit. "I’m not feeling generous for an employer that treats me like a child."

It’s not just the rank-and-file, according to Bloom. Middle managers aren’t any more enamored with RTO mandates than their reports.

“Ultimately it is the issue of trying to enforce rules set by the CEO that middle managers and employees don’t agree with,” Bloom said. “They simply do not see the point of coming in five days a week if they can be just as productive in two or three days a week. So they just don’t turn up.” 

How remote workers defy RTO mandates

That noncompliance comes in different forms.

“Coffee badging”: Some workers schedule emails to be sent after they’ve left the office, “coffee badge”  – swipe into the office, grab a cup of joe and head home or tap a coworker to swipe in for them – or they show up for short periods of time, chat up coworkers then peace out after lunch. According to Owl Labs, 44% of US employees who were ordered back to the office confessed to “coffee badging.” Seven in 10 employees admitted they’d been caught by their employers.

Ignoring RTO mandates: Another common strategy is to quietly ignore the RTO policy. At some firms where tracking and enforcement is lax, it’s possible to fly under the radar if you don’t make a fuss. "One of the biggest gripes was that of my team of 15, only two of us live in the city. What purpose would that serve? But also who would notice if we simply never went? We had no badges or in-office bosses," one worker said on Reddit. "So while a large chunk of people mass quit, we just simply never went in. I had to keep telling my coworker not to follow up. He kept wanting to ask about it and I’m like shut up, they don’t bring it up, we don’t bring it up."

Negotiating special treatment: High-ranking and top-performing employees who could be poached by competitors increasingly are using their leverage to cut deals. “Performance matters more than compliance,” Elliott said. “Managers when faced with mounting demands to ‘do more with less’ are unwilling to remove someone who's a good performer."

Comply then slack off: “Just do it for a few months then he'll forget about it” were the words of one senior executive to his team, according to Elliott. “I've looked at data from some of the commercial real estate management companies and you can also see an initial peak after a mandate and then a falloff – people complying for a while to make the boss or, more realistically, the boss's boss happy, then trailing off.”

Work-from-home holdouts may not be able to flout the rules much longer. After years of cajoling workers, employers are taking a harder line. 

According to a recent survey from real estate services firm CBRE, companies made more progress in the past year getting employees back to the office than at any time since 2020, with 72% reporting they are achieving their attendance goals and 38% anticipating further increases in attendance. 

Why your bosses are snooping on you

Encouraged by these results, they are looking to grow those numbers. Office surveillance is on the rise as companies step up monitoring and enforcement of office attendance at the highest rate in five years, the survey found. 

Of the companies surveyed, 69% are keeping tabs on how often employees come into the office and how long they stay – up from 45% last year through badge-swipe, cell-phone tracking and other methods.

Media reports say Amazon, Facebook owner Meta and TikTok all have systems to track attendance. Samsung recently rolled out a RTO tracking tool to crack down on “coffee badging” among its U.S. semiconductor staff, Business Insider reported. 

What’s more, nearly 37% of companies are taking enforcement actions, up from 17% in 2024, the CBRE report found.

One worker defied the RTO mandate for nearly a year. "I got an offer from another company that was fully remote, and as great timing would have it, when my boss called me to an in-person meeting at the office to tell me that I HAD to come back, I resigned on the spot," the worker wrote on Reddit. "Pretty good feeling."

Remote workers still have some leeway, according to Bloom. 

One chief human resources officer at a major company told Bloom they monitor whether employees are adhering to three days in the office over an eight-week period. Anyone showing up less than 1.5 days on average gets called in to see human resources. 

“You can see that is a lot of slack,” he said. “You can come in two days a week and be fine.”