The Office Came Back. Productivity Didn’t. Here’s How to Change That.

Six years ago, employers sent millions of people home to work remotely, changing the workplace overnight. Now, many are trying to reverse course—rolling out return-to-office (RTO) mandates, tightening performance expectations, and investing heavily in AI to regain productivity.

But there’s a problem: These decisions are being made without clear visibility into how they will actually play out inside the organization.

What looks like a policy decision at the top often breaks down in execution—unevenly, quietly, and too late to correct without cost.

RTO is surging—so is tension

According to a recent Business Insider article, Amazon’s layoffs, RTO push, and aggressive AI investments have become a high-profile example of what happens when execution doesn’t keep pace with intent.

Shortly after laying off more than 57,000 employees in late 2025 and early 2026, Amazon introduced a five-day in-office policy tracked through a new internal dashboard. On paper, the move was designed to increase accountability and productivity. In practice, employees report inconsistent enforcement across teams, rising confusion about expectations, and growing pressure that is driving burnout and attrition.

At the same time, employees are being evaluated on how often and effectively they use AI tools as part of a $200 billion investment. But adoption is uneven, quality is inconsistent, and many employees are unsure how these tools should change the way they work.

Amazon is not alone. From retail to banking, organizations across industries are making similar bets.

Some of these efforts succeed. Many do not. The difference is not the strategy. It’s whether leaders can see where execution will break early on, often showing up in the following ways:

• Managers interpreting expectations differently across teams
• Employees optimizing for the wrong outcomes
• New tools introduced without clear operating norms
• Signals of failure appearing too late to course-correct

By the time these issues surface in attrition, performance dips, or missed targets, the damage is already done.

The research is clear: Flexibility benefits employees and the bottom line

While these organizational changes are likely attempts at regaining post-pandemic value, a large body of evidence suggests that this approach may prove ineffective. An MIT Sloan Management survey reported that 61% of HR leaders say hybrid work has improved productivity. Likewise, a Stanford study with more than 1,500 hybrid employees concluded that hybrid work improved job satisfaction, increased retention rates, and demonstrated productivity equal to in-office models.

Notably, our research at Seramount shows that while 90% of employers have implemented some form of RTO policy, more than half of employees say these policies hurt their job satisfaction.

There are more negative RTO headlines every day. However, hundreds of organizations have stayed out of the spotlight despite rolling out similar RTO plans.

Two organizations can roll out identical RTO policies or AI initiatives and see completely different outcomes. This is not because one made a better decision but because one identified and addressed the friction points that determine whether policy that decisions hold in practice.

Avoid the headlines and deliver results with Assess360

For organizations to see ROI from RTO without risking reputational damage or talent attrition, they must make sense of what’s happening inside their organization and turn those insights into practical choices.

That’s what Assess360 is built for. Analyzing employee input against 1.6 million qualitative data points collected across industries, our pattern intelligence examines employee input, existing data, and organizational context. Then, it compares those patterns against a large body of real-world experience.

Assess360 is backed by decades of workforce research and advisory experience, allowing patterns to be recognized quickly and interpreted within their context.

Put simply, Assess360 pinpoints what’s getting in the way and defines a small, clear set of actions that leaders can stand behind. Equipped with these insights, you can make sustainable, data-driven decisions that correct productivity problems.

In practice, COOs, CHROs, and other leaders can leverage Assess360 to dive deeper than KPIs and keystrokes to find the real friction points, such as:

• Where expectations need to be clarified or redefined
• Which manager behaviors will determine success or failure
• What operating norms must be standardized to avoid inconsistency
• Where adoption risk is highest and how to mitigate it early

This is not just about collecting more feedback or generating more data. It’s about making the right decisions before misalignment turns into missed targets, attrition, or wasted investment.

By helping you to avoid these misalignments, Assess360 can jumpstart your current initiatives while protecting long-term investments. With RTO specifically, it goes beyond the guesswork of measuring presence to evaluate productivity. Instead, it finds the friction points and helps design reliable, profitable, and sustainable ways of maximizing productivity.