Over half of Fortune 100 businesses now mandate their employees return to the office full-time for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The flexible work era appears to be losing its shine, at least among the most prominent players in corporate America. According to fresh data from commercial real estate giant Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), 54 percent of companies now require employees to be in the office full time, a colossal jump from just five percent two years ago.
This dramatic pivot is detailed in JLL’s latest 25 Office Market Insights report for Q2 2025, which reveals the average mandated office presence now stands at 3.8 days a week, up from 2.6 days in Q2 2023. The trend signposts a decisive retreat from the hybrid working arrangements that defined post-pandemic office culture. Just 41 percent of Fortune 100 firms now support hybrid work, a significant drop from 78 percent two years ago.
Of the ten largest employers in the Fortune 100, seven demand in-person attendance at least four days a week, and the top three—Amazon, Walmart, and UnitedHealth Group—have reinstated full-time, five-day office mandates.
Big-name companies are leading the charge. Google, Amazon, and Starbucks have not only tightened their RTO policies but are reportedly offering cash incentives to remote workers to either relocate closer to their offices or leave the company. Albeit, Amazon has been struggling to implement its full-time RTO mandate due to a lack of space in US cities.
JPMorgan Chase followed suit in January, mandating all staff return full time, while the new Trump administration has enforced a five-day in-office rule for federal workers.
What C-Suite and IT Leaders Need to Know Now
For CIOs, CTOs, COOs, and members of enterprise tech-buying committees, this sharp return to physical workspaces reshapes several strategic priorities, from IT infrastructure to real estate spending, security protocols, and employee experience.
First, network and workplace tech investments must evolve again. Over the past three years, many firms have optimised their environments for distributed work, investing heavily in collaboration tools, cloud-first infrastructure, and endpoint security. Now, leaders must recalibrate for hybrid parity and in-person productivity, ensuring seamless connectivity across both in-office and legacy remote tech stacks.
Second, there’s a renewed pressure to rationalise office space and tech real estate spend. JLL’s report shows only marginal gains in actual attendance despite stricter mandates, suggesting empty-desk inefficiencies persist. Leaders may need to reimagine how physical space is used, investing in smart occupancy tools, desk-booking platforms, and modernised meeting spaces to reflect evolving patterns of presence.
HR and IT also need to work closely together to address employee engagement and attrition risks. The rise of “task-masking”, where employees post videos pretending to be busy at their desks to maintain appearances, can’t be dismissed as just TikTok fodder. It illustrates a more profound disconnect between leadership mandates and employee mindset. If RTO policies are to succeed, they must be paired with cultural incentives, flexibility within structure, and compelling in-office experiences that justify the commute.
Finally, enterprise tech buyers should scrutinise the implications of shifting work modes on long-term vendor relationships. Platforms that once held prime position for remote support may now need to integrate more deeply with physical workplace systems, from access control to in-office analytics.
Is the Remote Work Revolution Over? Not Quite
However, while the return to the office may be gathering pace, it’s not a simple rewind. This RTO movement is far from universal or unstoppable. A Gallup poll shows that 51 percent of Americans in remote-compatible jobs still work from home at least part of the time, a sign that flexibility remains a staple among smaller or more progressive employers.
Meanwhile, it’s clearer than ever that workers treasure flexible and hybrid working as a key priority when choosing jobs, if not the key priority. Owl Labs’ State of Hybrid Work Report 2024 signposted the importance of flexible working for the modern workforce. It found that almost half of workers would quit their roles if their organisation ended hybrid working and instituted a full-time in-office policy.
This materialised after Amazon announced its full-time RTO mandate. Blind, a forum for verified tech workers, surveyed 2,500 Amazon employees in the aftermath of the announcement. The results showed that 91 percent of respondents were unhappy with the new RTO mandate, and nearly three-fourths (73 percent) were considering seeking employment elsewhere.
Putting the remote/hybrid work genie back into the lamp seems improbable despite the severity of these mandates.
For tech and executive leadership, this moment demands a nuanced, data-informed rethink of how we define work, presence, productivity, and value in the modern enterprise.
