When companies began calling employees back to the office, the dominant conversation was about productivity, culture, and the cost of vacant real estate. Those are legitimate concerns — but they are not the whole picture.
A question that received far less attention: who does coming back actually cost the most?
In my capstone research at Walden University, I explored the fault lines between employer and employee perspectives on return-to-office (RTO) policy in the post-pandemic workplace. What I found was a divide that runs deeper than scheduling preferences. It is a divide shaped by trust, autonomy, caregiving responsibilities, disability, and neurodivergence — and most organizations are not measuring any of it.
This article unpacks the research, names the groups bearing the hidden cost, and offers a practical policy checklist for HR leaders who want to get this right.
The employer–employee divide: what the data shows
By the spring of 2020, more than 50% of U.S. workdays were occurring remotely (Bloom et al., 2023). What surprised many employers was that productivity did not collapse — in many cases, it improved. Organizations that had been skeptical of remote work were forced to confront evidence that their assumptions about presence and performance were not as solid as they believed.
Yet as the pandemic receded, employers moved quickly toward mandating in-office work, citing concerns about culture, collaboration, and innovation. A 2023 Harvard Business Review survey of senior executives across approximately 500 U.S. businesses found that while many leaders publicly advocated for return-to-office, privately they doubted full-time office work would ever return to 2019 levels (Bloom et al., 2023). Executives surveyed expected both hybrid and remote work to continue growing through 2028.
My Walden research identified three primary drivers of the employer push for RTO: managerial distrust of remote employees’ productivity, concerns about organizational culture and innovation, and the financial pressure of sunk costs in high-priced commercial real estate (Templer, 2024). None of these drivers are directly related to the quality or quantity of work employees can produce — a disconnect that contributes significantly to the frustration on both sides.
Employees, meanwhile, cited flexibility, autonomy, reduced commute time and expense, and improved mental well-being as the primary reasons they preferred hybrid or fully remote arrangements (Gintova, 2024; Hirsch, 2023). Research by Chafi et al. (2022) found that employees who had experienced meaningful autonomy during the remote work period came to see flexible work as a right rather than a privilege — a view sharply at odds with how most employers frame the conversation.
“The companies that experienced the most success in a fully remote environment did not emphasize presenteeism — they had strong teams with high levels of trust.”
— Templer, 2024 (citing Pass & Ridgway, 2022)
Who bears the hidden cost
RTO policies are rarely presented as anything other than neutral operational decisions. But research is increasingly clear that their impact is not neutral — and that the employees who bear the greatest cost are among the least likely to say so openly.
Caregivers and women
Research published in 2025 in Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Kalmanovich-Cohen) identifies women and caregivers as among the groups most disproportionately affected by RTO mandates. The reasons are structural: women continue to carry a disproportionate share of family caregiving responsibilities, making daily commutes and fixed office schedules significantly more costly in both time and money. Hybrid flexibility, for many of these employees, was not a convenience — it was a logistics solution that enabled them to remain in the workforce at all.
Employees with disabilities
Remote and hybrid work opened meaningful access to employment for many people living with physical disabilities, chronic illness, and mental health conditions. A now-resolved EEOC case illustrates what is becoming increasingly common. In EEOC v. Total Systems Services (settled November 2024), a customer service representative with disabilities repeatedly requested remote work as a reasonable accommodation due to her high-risk COVID-19 status. Total Systems denied the request — not because the role could not be performed remotely (other employees in her department were already doing so), but because the company applied blanket criteria to all remote work requests rather than conducting the individualized assessment required by the ADA. The employee was ultimately forced to resign to protect her own safety. The company settled for $65,000 in damages and was required to implement ADA compliance training for all U.S. managers and HR personnel.
The legal failure at the centre of this case is the same failure embedded in many RTO rollouts: a blanket policy applied uniformly, without any process to identify employees for whom that policy constitutes the removal of a functional accommodation. As Brice (2023) notes in BusinessWest, employers retain a legal duty to engage in an individualized, interactive dialogue with any employee requesting accommodation — and many are not doing so.
Neurodivergent employees, including those with ADHD
For neurodivergent employees, the office environment itself is the barrier. Open-plan workspaces with unpredictable noise levels, fluorescent lighting, frequent interruptions, and the social demands of an office day are not minor inconveniences — they actively degrade focus, increase cognitive load, and can eliminate the conditions under which some employees do their most effective work.
Remote and hybrid flexibility functioned, for many of these employees, as an informal accommodation. When RTO mandates remove that flexibility without a corresponding process for identifying and supporting neurodivergent needs, organizations are not simply adjusting a scheduling policy. They are removing a functional support — and rarely acknowledging it.
Proximity bias and the two-tiered workplace
Kalmanovich-Cohen (2025) also raises a concern that deserves particular attention from HR leaders: proximity bias. Employees who are physically present in the office receive more visibility, more access to mentorship, and more career advancement opportunities. For underrepresented groups who may already have fewer informal sponsorship networks, this is not a minor disadvantage. A poorly designed RTO policy can quietly reinforce a two-tiered workplace where in-person presence becomes a proxy for performance — and where those who cannot or do not come in every day fall further behind.
RTO mandates are not scheduling decisions. They are equity decisions. The question is whether organizations are treating them that way.
What equitable RTO policy design actually looks like
Equitable RTO design does not require abandoning the office. Research consistently supports the value of intentional in-person collaboration for relationship-building, innovation, and mentorship — particularly for newer employees (Bloom et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2022). The goal is not to argue for full remote work. It is to argue for policies designed with the full range of your workforce in mind.
A 2024 Gartner survey found that human-centric hybrid models — those built around flexibility, intentional collaboration, and empathy-based leadership — produce the strongest performance outcomes. SHRM’s reporting on hybrid best practices (Hirsch, 2024) points to the same conclusion: outcomes-based performance management, flexible scheduling, and intentional relationship-building outperform rigid presence requirements on every talent metric that matters.
My Walden research proposed a three-part framework for bridging the employer-employee divide: moving management culture from control-based to trust-based models; designing work allocation around the environments in which tasks are best performed; and building communication practices that actively include employee voice in work model decisions (Templer, 2024).
Policy checklist for HR leaders
Before finalizing or revising your RTO policy, use this checklist to identify gaps in equity and inclusion planning.
| ☐ | Policy action | Why it matters |
| ☐ | Conduct an equity impact assessment | Identify which employee groups (caregivers, people with disabilities, neurodivergent employees, low-wage workers) bear disproportionate cost from the policy before it launches. |
| ☐ | Review accommodation status before mandating return | Any employee currently receiving remote work as a disability or medical accommodation requires an individualized review — not a blanket RTO notice. |
| ☐ | Shift to outcomes-based performance metrics | Presence-based evaluation reinforces proximity bias. Clearly defined outcomes allow employees to be assessed on results regardless of where work occurs. |
| ☐ | Audit for proximity bias risk | Are advancement, mentorship, and visibility opportunities equitably available to hybrid and remote employees? If not, the policy needs structural mitigation. |
| ☐ | Design in-office time with intention | Specify what in-person time is for (collaboration, onboarding, relationship-building) and communicate this clearly. ‘Come in because we said so’ is not a strategy. |
| ☐ | Create a confidential feedback mechanism | Employees are unlikely to raise concerns about RTO costs on record. Build in a channel for anonymous feedback and act on what you hear. |
| ☐ | Train managers in trust-based leadership | Policies only work if the people implementing them understand the why. Manager training on autonomy-supportive leadership reduces the risk of policy being applied inconsistently or punitively. |
| ☐ | Revisit policy at six-month intervals | RTO policy is not a one-time decision. Build in structured review points tied to actual data — turnover, engagement scores, accommodation requests — not anecdote. |
The question worth asking
If you surveyed your team right now — anonymously — who do you think would tell you that return-to-office has cost them something real? A longer commute. A caregiving arrangement that no longer works. A sensory environment that makes it hard to think. A career opportunity missed because they were not visible enough.
The gap between what employees will say on record and what they would say in confidence is significant. Bridging that gap — not just setting the policy — is the leadership work.
Organizations that are willing to ask the harder questions before finalizing RTO policy will be better positioned to retain the employees they most need to keep. Those who don’t will find out the answer the hard way: through turnover data, accommodation requests, and quiet disengagement from the people who had the most to give.
Working through a return-to-office transition?
Whether you’re an HR leader designing more equitable policy, an executive navigating team resistance, or a neurodivergent professional figuring out how to advocate for what you need — coaching can help you find the path forward. Reach out at faelyne@faelyne.com or visit pathpurposecoaching.com.
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