Here’s Why Return-To-Office Mandates Are Flopping In Corporate America

Employees have come up with creative ways to slip out of the office to their remote haven while still satisfying the turnstile swipe.

As return-to-office (RTO) mandates for employees have taken over due to orders handed down by the White House administration, data show physical bodies are back at cubicles, but employee mental and professional habits remain in a remote setting, Gleb Tsipursky wrote in a column for The Hill.

Research from the Flex Index highlights employer office mandates increased by 13% between the second quarter of 2024 and 2025, but physical attendance only went up one percent over the same time span. Employees have come up with creative ways to slip out of the office to their remote haven while still satisfying the turnstile swipe. The term “coffee-badging”—that is, employees swipe in, grab some job, and slip back out to work remotely—has become so popular that 44% of employees in the U.S. admit to using the practice.

After engineers for Amazon already curated plans to adapt the practice after the company issued a five-day office mandate, Stanford economist Nick Bloom said “attendance is flat as a pancake” as a way to summarize the decrease in healthy RTO mandates.

The backlash isn’t new, a number of corporate employees pushed back starting in 2022 when post-COVID 19 restrictions loosened. In 2024, according to a column in Inc., a group of Dell employees put their employment status at risk when it was mandated for them to return.

“That’s fine. We’d rather do a better job in a more comfortable environment. By the way, we’ve moved to New Zealand,” the group said.

However, as the concept of punching in and ditching became more popular for corporate and federal employees, the government stepped in to help employers guarantee their workers wouldn’t flee. An April 21 memo from the Office of Management and Budget dated ordered agencies to start “utilization monitoring,” providing facility managers with the authority to pull badge-swipe and computer-login data in an effort to confirm physical and daily presence.

Departments like NASA quickly jumped on with its METEOR system, recording every entry and exit, even going as far as tracking how long employees stayed out for their lunch break. The concept blew away employees’ unions. They believed minute-by-minute tracking could chill whistleblowing and collaborative efforts, as employees will start to concern themselves with what walking to another division without formal clearance would look like to superiors.

While corporate leaders push a narrative that in-person presence promotes an increase in company culture, employees unleash reasons why that isn’t the case. Some feel sitting in traffic just to jump on a virtual call doesn’t add value. The topic of flexibility also plays a part, as once remote work affected employees of a certain demographic on a positive side. Employees who are parents were able to navigate school drop-offs and pick-ups while still being accessible to work demands.

And there is the debate of the lack of accessibility for disabled employees. As several made accommodations for themselves at home, employers have not made the same for affected employees to come back to the office.