How to Help Employees Return to Work

Balance employee flexibility with business needs while prioritizing customers in workplace decisions

First published on Inc.com, July 16, 2025

As more organizations bring employees back to the office, they face a complex challenge: How to repopulate the workplace without undermining the improved productivity and employee satisfaction enjoyed when working remotely. The operational logistics are real, but the psychological and culture hurdles are even more important.

While leaders need to focus on employee satisfaction, they must also ensure their Return to Office (RTO) models maintain customer satisfaction. For many organizations, remote work enhanced customer satisfaction through increased flexibility, faster response times, and streamlined processes.

Can organizations maintain those benefits when remote work tapers off? With purposeful planning, intentionally designed programs, transparency, and employee involvement they can.

Research confirms RTO’s benefits

We’ve all read about research confirming remote work brings numerous benefits, particularly for employees. However, studies documenting the benefits of RTO often garner less attention. Recent academic and organizational studies show RTO provides:

• Better productivity and connections. A 2024 WeWork study of business leaders found 82 percent of fully in-office and 76 percent of hybrid organizations reported significantly improved productivity, compared to 67 percent of all-remote companies.
• Innovation and serendipity. A 2024 study, led by University of Essex and University of Chicago economists, found remote or hybrid models reduce the number and quality of innovative ideas versus fully in-office teams.
• Employee experience drives success. A 2025 McKinsey survey determined that successful RTO initiatives depend less on how many days people spent in the office than on embracing best practices–collaboration, connection, mentoring, skill development–regardless of whether workers are in-office, hybrid, or remote.

Risks to employee engagement

Employees who become accustomed to the autonomy and flexibility of working from home are often resistant to returning to the office. Post-pandemic surveys show remote work boosted employee satisfaction as workers set their own hours, avoided lengthy commutes, and spent more time with their families. A 2025 Cisco study found 64 percent of employees reported being able to work remotely affects whether they stay in their job. Being ordered back to the workplace after years away presents employees with a potential loss of control. For them, RTO is more than a logistical change: It’s a return to a culture they probably don’t miss.

There are three main reasons employees struggle with RTO:

1. Perceived loss of autonomy. The sudden loss of flexible work arrangements threatens employees’ sense of control and may decrease motivation.
2. Mismatched value proposition. Digital tools have been proven effective, with many hybrid workers saying they are as productive–or more so– while working from home. They may question whether in-person work still has value.
3. Psychological safety and wellbeing. Working remotely helps employees address family demands and health concerns, avoids commuting stress, and saves time and money. For some, RTO is not a neutral ask; it’s an emotional stressor.

Effective leaders must be transparent, flexible, and empathetic to the stress that many may feel and seek creative ways to balance organizational demands with employees’ wants and needs.

Making customer-oriented RTO decisions

Creating RTO policies that balance customer needs with workplace flexibility adds another level of complexity to designing internal policies and procedures. Leaders must tread carefully to integrate employee expectations into solutions that maximize the customer experience. Here are some suggestions to help you navigate these concerns:

1. Understand customer expectations. Surveys and interviews can identify the levels of availability and quality customers expect from your delivery channels. Will return-to-office help maintain those expectations or harm them? Analyze customer interaction data and map the touchpoints on your customer journeys to ensure RTO policies will sustain desired outcomes.
2. Design policies that support a positive customer experience. Make sure service delivery channels can quickly and effectively handle customer calls, no matter where employees are located. Empower employees to handle issues on their own, and create procedures to escalate priority requests as needed.
3. Maintain a customer-centric workplace culture, regardless of where that workplace is located.
4. Select the workplace model(s) that best meet everyone’s needs. Offering flexible working arrangements that boost productivity and job satisfaction can also bring improved customer satisfaction. If you embrace RTO or hybrid models, create and communicate clear policies for how employees collaborate.
5. Track performance and monitor results. Tweak your RTO model as needed.

Preparing leaders to lead RTO

When employees think about RTO, they generally focus on personal benefits–more time at home, less stress–rather than how it can benefit customers and the organization. Leaders shouldn’t simply mandate office attendance: they need to design a supportive experience. Leaders crafting new policies should ensure employees understand how a robust RTO system benefits everyone. Here’s how:

1. Involve employees in the process. Ordering employees back to the office without communicating the reasons can breed resistance, a sense of betrayal and, ultimately, job turnover. Involve employees in designing work arrangements.
2. Explain “why.” Structure your message around shared values and motivators. Emphasize how being in the office together (or collaborating virtually) brings more creativity, stronger relationships, higher customer satisfaction, and better financial outcomes.
3. Offer flexibility. Forcing people to be in the office every day will probably backfire. If customer needs cannot be met by RTO, work with your teams to come up with other options, such as anchor days, four-day-workweeks, or core collaboration hours when everyone must be available.
4. Invest in office design that encourages spontaneous collaboration, such as cafes and open seating.
5. Walk the walk. If leaders continue working remotely while everyone else in the office, they lose credibility and create resentment. Model the behavior you expect from others and foster community through parties, mentorships, and team building events.

To bring people back to the office while maintaining both customer and employee satisfaction, leaders must juggle the needs of multiple stakeholders. Strategic RTO and hybrid models can create rich interactions, reinforce cultures, and create long-term benefits when leaders intentionally design solutions that take everyone’s needs into consideration.