For the past two years, return-to-office has been framed as a fight over flexibility. Employees want it, leaders are pulling it back, and everyone has an opinion on where and how work should happen.
But that framing misses what went wrong.
In this post-COVID reset, many leaders are reacting to something more immediate: half-empty offices, underused real estate, and a growing discomfort with not being able to see work happening. In some cases, that tension played out publicly, with pushback at companies such as Amazon and Starbucks.
It’s easy to interpret that as resistance.
But RTO didn’t fail because people refused to come back. It failed because most organizations never made it clear what they were coming back for.
The expectation was presence. The assumption was that performance would follow.
That’s the gap. Leaders were trying to drive productivity, but what they were actually managing was visibility.
When expectations aren’t clear, people don’t engage with the change. They continue operating as they always have.
The Data Doesn’t Support the Narrative
If RTO were truly about declining productivity, the data would tell a different story. Instead, most research points in the opposite direction
According to Seramount’s New Productivity Playbook, 83% of employees say they work more efficiently with flexibility, and 61% of HR leaders report that hybrid work has improved productivity.
What’s more, a Stanford study of more than 1,500 employees found that hybrid work maintained productivity while improving retention by 33% over time. At the same time, nearly 90% of organizations introduced return-to-office policies.
That disconnect is the real issue.
Leaders weren’t responding to a measurable drop in performance. They were responding to uncertainty about how productivity works in a hybrid environment.
Productivity Was Never Redefined
Before the pandemic, productivity was easier to interpret. Work was visible, meeting spaces were full, offices were buzzing. Presence signaled effort.
That model no longer holds.
Work today depends less on visibility and more on coordination, clarity, and focus. The work that drives results often happens outside of meetings and away from direct observation, which makes it harder to evaluate by using old assumptions.
Instead of redefining what good work looks like, many organizations defaulted to something simpler: more time in the office.
But being in the same place doesn’t automatically improve outcomes, decision speed, or how well teams work together. When those things aren’t clearly defined, telling people where to work just creates confusion about what matters most.
In practice, this confusion shows up quickly. What looks like a capacity or performance issue often turns out to be something else entirely—meetings consuming focus time, priorities competing, and expectations varying across teams. People aren’t underperforming. The system around them is.
RTO Became the Easier Answer
Redefining productivity requires clarity on outcomes, alignment across teams, and consistency in how expectations are reinforced. Mandating office presence is simpler. It creates a clear rule without requiring deeper changes to how work will get done.
And in many cases, it worked on paper. The RTO policy was clear. People came back. Offices filled up. But the expected gains in productivity were harder to find.
What wasn’t clear was how teams were supposed to work differently. Without that, being in the office didn’t improve execution.
Some teams added more meetings. Others changed nothing. Most continued operating the same way.
What Most Organizations Miss
More than half of employees reported that these policies hurt job satisfaction—another signal that the issue wasn’t location, but how work was structured (Seramount, 2025).
The organizations making progress are not focused on where people sit. They are focused on what enables performance. They define expectations clearly, align managers so reinforcement is consistent, and communicate in practical terms what “good” looks like in day-to-day work.
But just as important, they take the time to understand what is getting in the way.
Because what slows productivity down is rarely obvious. It shows up in how work moves across teams, how decisions get made, and where priorities compete. Most of it sits below the surface.
That’s the step most RTO strategies skipped.
Most organizations already have inputs, but those stay at the surface. The data shows what is happening, not why execution is breaking down. And without that distinction, leaders move to action too quickly.
Before resetting expectations, leaders need a clear view of how work is actually happening, where friction is building, and which issues are materially slowing progress. Not all problems are equal. Some are noise. Others are the difference between momentum and stalled execution.
The Bottom Line
RTO didn’t fail because leaders pushed too hard. It failed because they acted on a productivity problem they never clearly defined—and in some cases, never actually validated.
That same pattern is showing up again in AI adoption, operating model changes, and cost pressures. The instinct is to move quickly, but without clarity, speed often creates more work instead of better outcomes.
Productivity is not about where people sit. It is about whether people understand what is expected of them, how their work connects to outcomes, and what needs to change to improve it.
Most organizations lack clarity on what is really getting in the way of execution.
That’s the step most RTO strategies skipped—and where many transformation efforts still break down today.
Assess360 helps leaders close that gap. It surfaces the patterns behind how work actually happens, distinguishes root causes from noise, and translates that insight into a set of defensible decisions leaders can act on with confidence.
Because changing location is easy. Changing how work actually gets done is harder—and that’s where productivity is won or lost.
If you’re rethinking how productivity is defined and operationalized in your organization, connect with our team to learn how Assess360 helps leaders move from signal to execution clarity.
