By Andrea Bossi ·Updated February 16, 2026 /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

More workplaces are leaning away from pandemic-era learnings about how well working from home can work. Instead, they’re mandating “RTO” policies, or forcing their workers to return-to-office, and it’s building up tensions.

Today, just over a third of U.S. firms are requiring workers to be in office for five days a week, according to data from workforce research group Flex Index. Big tech companies like Instagram and Amazon led the charge. Other big names like Home Depot have followed suit.

The issue? During the pandemic, it became clear that working from home works. In fact, it can be more efficient and more ideal to, for example, parents or those who need more flexibility. But today’s employers are claiming returning to the office is about efficiency, inspiring creativity, and building workplace culture. (It’s also, quietly, about real estate.) The issue with their message? Workers aren’t buying it and are responding accordingly. They’re still following RTO orders, but not intrinsically. 

“My biggest guess is we’ll see more compliance with RTO mandates than before,” LiveCareer job expert Jasmine Escalera told CNBC. “But that compliance may not be due to the fact that employees are like, ‘Yes put me back into the office; I’m ready to go.’”

Instead, Escalera flags that workers today are “choosing to stay in jobs and hunker down and accept things they would not normally accept” because they don’t have other options. After all, the job market is seeing hundreds of jobs thousands of cuts and little hiring, with Black and indigenous unemployment the highest of all racial groups. 

To understand how anti-RTO workers are, a quick look at the numbers says everything. Both Gen Z and millennials currently comprise more than half of the U.S. labor force, and the stats show how strongly these generations don’t want a full week RTO. Gallup data shows that only 6% of Gen Z desires to be fully in-person, while 4% of millennials feel this way.

Experts warn that the RTO wave will lead to, according to CNBC, sweeping trends like brain drain and burnout. Some workers might go as far as quitting their job that mandates RTO, even in a cooling job market. Some employment experts think that’s the point: Companies might be using mandates as a way to push their workers out, to the point of quitting on their own, in which case the company doesn’t have to pay for severance packages.

“The probability of more skilled employees departing after RTO mandates is 77% higher than that of less skilled workers,” University of Pittsburgh business administration professor Mark Ma told CNBC. “The probability of senior employees departing after RTO mandates is 36% higher than that of junior workers.”

Most places still are maintaining some sort of hybrid work schedule, but the future of RTO (and brain drain) is uncertain, especially as more tech giants push for their workers to go into the office full-time.

The post More Companies Are Mandating Return To Office—As Worker Burnout Rises appeared first on Essence.