The Hidden Costs of Return-to-Office Mandates: How Policy Enforcement Erodes Talent, Trust, and Competitive Advantage

Jonathan H. Westover, PhD
Nov 30, 2025
17 min read

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Abstract: Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have emerged as a dominant organizational response to perceived productivity and culture challenges in post-pandemic work environments. However, mounting evidence suggests that mandatory in-office attendance policies generate substantial hidden costs that undermine the very outcomes leaders seek to achieve. This article synthesizes research on talent attrition, employee engagement, and competitive positioning to demonstrate that RTO mandates often function as blunt instruments that erode organizational capability rather than build it. Drawing on behavioral economics, organizational psychology, and strategic human capital research, we examine how policy enforcement approaches trigger psychological contract violations, selection effects that disproportionately lose high performers, and strategic vulnerabilities in talent-competitive markets. Evidence from organizations across financial services, technology, and professional services sectors reveals that companies defaulting to attendance-based mandates experience measurable losses in retention, engagement, innovation capacity, and employer brand strength. The analysis concludes by identifying evidence-based organizational responses that address legitimate coordination and culture concerns without incurring the costs associated with mandate-driven approaches, emphasizing outcome measurement, leadership capability development, and employee autonomy as critical alternatives to policy enforcement.

The past two years have witnessed an accelerating wave of return-to-office mandates across corporate America. From Amazon's five-day requirement to Disney's four-day policy, high-profile organizations have publicly anchored their competitive strategies to physical presence (Elliott et al., 2025). The stated rationale typically centers on culture preservation, innovation stimulation, and productivity enhancement. Senior leaders often return from peer gatherings convinced that stricter in-office requirements will solve the coordination challenges and engagement concerns that have emerged in hybrid environments.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests these mandates carry substantial hidden costs that leaders systematically underestimate. While executives fixate on the visible challenges of distributed work—empty offices, harder-to-measure productivity, concerns about career development for junior employees—they often overlook the less visible but more consequential impacts of mandate-driven approaches. These include accelerated attrition of high-performing talent, erosion of psychological contracts built during the pandemic, selection effects that disproportionately retain less mobile workers, and competitive disadvantage in talent markets where flexibility has become a decisive factor.

The stakes are particularly high because these costs compound over time. A mandate that triggers 5% higher attrition among top performers doesn't just create a one-time hiring challenge; it initiates a cycle of knowledge loss, cultural disruption, and weakened employer brand that persists for years. Organizations that default to policy enforcement rather than capability building may win short-term compliance battles while losing longer-term wars for talent, innovation, and market position.

This article examines the multifaceted costs of RTO mandates through research evidence and organizational examples, demonstrating why treating hybrid work as a policy challenge rather than a leadership capability challenge undermines the very outcomes executives seek to achieve.

The Return-to-Office Mandate Landscape

Defining RTO Mandates in the Post-Pandemic Context

Return-to-office mandates refer to organizational policies that specify minimum required in-office attendance, typically measured in days per week or month, with explicit or implicit consequences for non-compliance. These policies exist on a spectrum from full-time in-office requirements (five days per week) to hybrid mandates (typically three to four days) to more flexible arrangements that emphasize outcomes over presence (Barrero et al., 2023).

What distinguishes mandates from flexible policies is the locus of control. Mandates centralize decision-making authority with organizational leaders, treating workplace location as a compliance matter to be monitored through badge data, calendar tracking, or manager oversight. In contrast, outcome-focused flexible policies distribute authority to teams or individuals, treating location as one variable among many that teams optimize based on work requirements and personal circumstances (Elliott et al., 2025).

The psychological and behavioral implications of this distinction are profound. Mandates signal mistrust, frame the employment relationship as transactional rather than relational, and activate reactance—the psychological tendency to resist perceived threats to autonomy (Brehm & Brehm, 1981). Even when employees would voluntarily choose in-office work for certain tasks, the mandatory nature of the policy can undermine intrinsic motivation and perceived organizational support.

Prevalence, Drivers, and Industry Distribution

Analysis of over 8,500 U.S. companies through the Flex Index reveals that approximately 60% of knowledge workers now operate under some form of hybrid arrangement, with roughly 25% working fully remotely and only 15% required in offices full-time (Elliott et al., 2025). However, these aggregate statistics mask significant variation in policy stringency and enforcement intensity.

Several factors drive RTO mandate adoption. Real estate commitments create sunk cost pressures, particularly for organizations with long-term leases in expensive urban markets. Managerial skill gaps in leading distributed teams lead some leaders to default to presence-based oversight rather than developing outcome measurement capabilities. Peer influence plays a substantial role, with executives anchoring to competitor policies or advice received at industry gatherings rather than analyzing their own organizational data (Elliott et al., 2025). Generational assumptions about career development and mentorship often surface, with senior leaders projecting their own early-career experiences onto fundamentally different technological and social contexts.

Industry patterns are notable. Financial services firms, particularly those in trading and client-facing roles, have implemented more stringent mandates, citing collaboration intensity and regulatory requirements. Technology companies have shown the widest variation, with some (like Atlassian and Airbnb) embracing distributed-first models while others (like Amazon) requiring five-day office attendance. Professional services firms occupy a middle ground, often implementing role-based flexibility that varies by function and client demands.

Organizational and Individual Consequences of RTO Mandates

Organizational Performance Impacts

The performance implications of RTO mandates extend well beyond the immediate compliance question to affect talent quality, innovation capacity, and strategic positioning. Research examining the actual behavioral responses to mandates reveals patterns that challenge the assumptions underlying policy-first approaches.

Adverse selection effects represent perhaps the most consequential organizational cost. When mandates are announced or enforced, employees face a choice: comply or seek alternative employment. However, this choice is not equally constrained across the talent distribution. High performers with specialized skills, strong networks, and proven track records face significantly lower switching costs and more abundant outside options than average or below-average performers (Bloom et al., 2015). The result is a selection mechanism that disproportionately retains less mobile workers while losing the talent organizations can least afford to lose.

This pattern has been observed across multiple organizations implementing strict RTO policies. Employees with the strongest performance records and most marketable skills tend to have greater leverage in negotiating flexible arrangements or finding alternative employers willing to accommodate remote work preferences. The net effect is a talent distribution shift that organizations often don't recognize until quarters after mandate implementation, when performance gaps become evident and replacement costs mount.

Knowledge loss and coordination costs compound as mandate-driven attrition concentrates in specific functions or expertise areas. Organizations lose not just individual capability but also the relationship networks and tacit knowledge that enable effective collaboration. The cost of replacing a senior engineer or experienced consultant includes not only recruiting and onboarding expenses but also the productivity loss as remaining team members compensate for missing expertise and the risk of project delays or quality degradation.

Innovation capacity may also suffer under rigid attendance mandates. While proponents argue that serendipitous in-office interactions drive creativity, research suggests the relationship is more nuanced. Bloom and colleagues' seminal work on remote work effectiveness demonstrated that properly managed remote arrangements can maintain or enhance productivity for many knowledge work tasks (Bloom et al., 2015). Innovation requires both generative activities (brainstorming, exploring possibilities) and evaluative activities (critical analysis, refinement). Mandates that force co-presence regardless of task requirements may optimize for one at the expense of the other (Choudhury, 2020). Organizations like Airbnb that provide flexibility while creating intentional collaboration opportunities through structured offsites report maintaining innovation metrics while retaining talent (Choudhury, 2025).

Individual Wellbeing and Stakeholder Impacts

The individual-level costs of RTO mandates manifest in psychological contract violations, work-life conflict intensification, and engagement erosion. These effects are neither uniform nor trivial; they concentrate in specific demographic groups and carry implications for organizational equity and inclusion.

Psychological contract violations occur when employees perceive that implicit or explicit organizational promises have been broken (Rousseau, 1995). During the pandemic, many organizations explicitly praised employees for maintaining productivity while working remotely, some offering permanent flexibility as a retention tool. Subsequent mandate reversals trigger feelings of betrayal and organizational mistrust. This matters because psychological contract violations predict reduced organizational commitment, lower discretionary effort, and increased turnover intentions even controlling for objective job characteristics.

Disproportionate burden on caregivers and underrepresented groups raises equity concerns. Research consistently shows that women, particularly mothers, place higher value on workplace flexibility than men on average, reflecting persistent gender differences in caregiving responsibilities (Mas & Pallais, 2017). RTO mandates that eliminate flexibility disproportionately affect these employees, potentially reversing diversity gains achieved through more inclusive pandemic-era policies. Organizations tracking demographic patterns in post-mandate attrition often discover that departures skew female, further from corporate headquarters, and toward employees with caregiving responsibilities.

Geographic and socioeconomic inequities also emerge. Mandates that require multi-day office attendance impose differential costs on employees based on commute distance, housing affordability near offices, and access to reliable transportation. An employee living 45 minutes from the office faces dramatically different time and financial costs than one living 10 minutes away. When organizations permitted remote work during the pandemic, many employees relocated to more affordable areas or closer to family support systems. Mandates that ignore these pandemic-era decisions effectively penalize employees for choices made with organizational blessing.

Health and wellbeing impacts extend beyond simple work-life balance. Long commutes correlate with increased stress, reduced sleep quality, decreased physical activity, and lower overall life satisfaction (Stutzer & Frey, 2008). For employees with chronic health conditions, disabilities, or neurodivergence, remote work often represents not merely a preference but an accommodation that enables full participation. Blanket mandates that eliminate these accommodations risk compliance issues and exclude talented individuals who thrived in flexible environments.

Evidence-Based Organizational Responses

Organizations experiencing success with distributed and hybrid work share common characteristics that have nothing to do with specific attendance policies. Instead, they've invested in leadership capabilities, measurement systems, and cultural norms that enable effective collaboration regardless of location. The following interventions represent evidence-based alternatives to mandate-driven approaches.

Outcome-Based Performance Management Systems

The fundamental shift required for successful hybrid work involves moving from presence-based to outcome-based assessment. This sounds straightforward but requires substantial organizational capability development, particularly for managers trained to equate visibility with productivity.

Research on remote work effectiveness consistently identifies clear goal-setting and regular feedback as critical success factors (Allen et al., 2015). Organizations that excel in flexible environments implement structured processes for defining expected outcomes, establishing measurable milestones, and providing continuous feedback loops. This contrasts with traditional performance management systems that often rely on informal observation and periodic reviews.

Effective approaches include:

Objective Key Results (OKR) frameworks that cascade from organizational to team to individual levels, creating transparency about priorities and measurable definitions of success
Sprint-based delivery models adapted from agile software development, establishing regular rhythms for goal-setting, progress review, and adaptation
Leading and lagging indicator dashboards that provide real-time visibility into both activity metrics (leading indicators like customer calls completed) and outcome metrics (lagging indicators like deals closed or customer satisfaction)
Peer-based accountability mechanisms such as daily standups or weekly team retrospectives that create horizontal rather than exclusively vertical oversight
Customer or stakeholder feedback integration into performance assessment, shifting evaluation criteria from manager observation to impact on those served

Allstate transformed its performance management approach following its shift to a remote-first model in 2020. The insurance company implemented a framework emphasizing results delivery over physical presence, training managers to assess employee contributions through measurable outputs rather than office visibility. The company tracked not only individual performance metrics but also team collaboration patterns and employee engagement scores. By 2023, Allstate reported maintaining productivity levels while achieving higher employee satisfaction and lower real estate costs, demonstrating that outcome focus and flexibility reinforce rather than contradict each other (Elliott et al., 2025).

Transparent Communication and Participation in Policy Design

A substantial portion of mandate-related backlash stems not from the policies themselves but from how they're developed and communicated. Top-down pronouncements that ignore employee input or dismiss legitimate concerns trigger resistance even when the underlying policy might garner support through inclusive design processes.

Research on organizational change consistently demonstrates that participation in decision-making increases both the quality of decisions and the commitment to implementing them (Kotter, 1996). When employees understand the reasoning behind workplace policies and have opportunities to shape implementation, they respond more positively even when the outcome differs from their initial preference.

Effective communication and participation approaches include:

Employee surveys and listening sessions that genuinely solicit input before policies are finalized rather than after they're announced
Pilot programs that test different approaches with volunteer teams, gathering data on what works before scaling
Transparent data sharing about the specific challenges the organization aims to solve (e.g., showing collaboration pattern analysis rather than asserting that "innovation requires in-office work")
Role-based differentiation that acknowledges different functions have different collaboration requirements rather than applying uniform mandates
Regular policy review cycles that treat workplace arrangements as dynamic systems requiring continuous adjustment rather than permanent solutions

Capital One approached its hybrid policy development by forming employee working groups across functions to identify role-specific collaboration requirements. Rather than imposing a uniform three-day mandate, the financial services company enabled teams to determine their optimal in-office cadence based on actual work patterns and coordination needs. This participatory approach generated significantly less resistance than mandate-driven policies at peer institutions, while still achieving leadership's goals of increasing intentional collaboration and maintaining company culture (Elliott et al., 2025).

Investment in Distributed Collaboration Technology and Skills

Many organizations expect hybrid work to succeed without making corresponding investments in the technology infrastructure and skill development required for distributed collaboration. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: leaders mandate office presence because distributed collaboration feels inefficient, but it feels inefficient precisely because the organization hasn't invested in making it work well.

Research on telecommuting effectiveness indicates that appropriate technology infrastructure and clear communication protocols are essential enablers of successful remote and hybrid arrangements (Allen et al., 2015). Organizations that excel in flexible environments treat these as strategic investments rather than IT expenses.

Technology and skill investments include:

Asynchronous collaboration platforms (such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Notion) that enable continuous information sharing without requiring real-time presence
Digital whiteboarding and brainstorming tools that replicate generative collaboration activities previously done on physical whiteboards
High-quality video conferencing infrastructure in both home and office environments, ensuring equity of experience regardless of location
Meeting design training that helps teams distinguish which meetings benefit from synchronous attendance versus asynchronous updates
Documentation and knowledge management systems that reduce reliance on hallway conversations and make information accessible to distributed team members
Inclusive facilitation skills that ensure remote participants have equal voice and visibility in hybrid meetings where some attend in-person and others virtually

Atlassian has invested heavily in what it calls "Team Anywhere" capabilities, recognizing that successful distributed work requires both technological infrastructure and behavioral change. The software company provides employees with stipends for home office equipment, offers extensive training on asynchronous communication practices, and has developed detailed playbooks for running effective distributed meetings and brainstorming sessions. Rather than mandating office presence to solve collaboration challenges, Atlassian built the capabilities that make distributed collaboration work, retaining talent that competitors lost to inflexible mandates while maintaining innovation velocity (Choudhury, 2025).

Reimagined Office Spaces as Collaboration Hubs

A common mistake in RTO mandate design involves forcing employees back to offices that were designed for individual focused work rather than the collaboration activities that genuinely benefit from co-presence. When employees commute to offices only to spend the day on video calls in cubicles, the policy feels pointless and the organization foregoes the legitimate benefits of physical proximity.

Organizations experiencing success with hybrid models often reimagine office spaces as collaboration destinations rather than daily work locations. This involves both physical redesign and cultural repositioning of what office time accomplishes. The insight from workplace research is that physical proximity can enhance certain types of collaboration, but only when spaces are intentionally designed to support those interactions.

Office redesign strategies include:

Reduction in individual workstations with corresponding expansion of collaboration zones designed for team activities
"Neighborhoods" or team zones that concentrate people who work together rather than seating alphabetically or by job level
Bookable project rooms equipped with technology for intensive collaboration sprints
Social and community spaces that facilitate informal networking and relationship building
Equal-access meeting rooms designed to ensure remote participants have equivalent experience to those in-room (e.g., individual cameras and microphones rather than single room cameras)
Activity-based working zones optimized for different work modes (quiet focus areas, phone booth privacy, collaborative project spaces)

Salesforce redesigned its office spaces following the adoption of a "flex" model that allows employees to choose their work location. The company converted traditional workstation-heavy floors into collaboration-focused environments with fewer assigned desks and more team project areas, innovation labs, and employee wellness spaces. The redesign recognizes that if employees will spend focused individual work time at home, office time should be optimized for activities that genuinely benefit from co-presence. Salesforce reports that post-redesign office utilization metrics show higher-quality collaboration when employees are on-site, even though overall office attendance is lower than pre-pandemic levels (Choudhury, 2025).

Leadership Development for Distributed Team Management

Perhaps the most critical intervention involves developing leadership capabilities for effectively managing distributed teams. Many managers were promoted based on technical expertise or client relationship skills, never receiving training in the fundamentally different approaches required for leading teams where presence is not a proxy for performance.

Effective leadership of distributed teams requires distinct competencies, including trust-building without physical proximity, providing clarity in ambiguous environments, and creating psychological safety across digital channels. Organizations that default to mandates often do so because their managers lack these capabilities, choosing policy enforcement over leadership development.

Leadership development priorities include:

Trust-based management training that helps leaders shift from activity monitoring to outcome measurement
Inclusive meeting facilitation skills ensuring managers can create equivalent participation opportunities for distributed attendees
Asynchronous communication proficiency enabling leaders to provide clarity and feedback without relying exclusively on real-time interaction
Assessment of team psychological safety helping managers identify when team members feel safe raising concerns or challenging ideas regardless of location
Coaching on structured check-ins that provide regular connection without micromanagement
Data literacy for collaboration analytics enabling evidence-based decisions about when in-person time adds value versus when distributed work suffices

Teradyne, a semiconductor equipment manufacturer, invested in extensive manager training when adopting flexible work policies for engineering teams. The company recognized that managers trained in traditional co-located oversight needed new skills for leading distributed technical teams. Training emphasized outcome clarity, structured communication rhythms, and data-driven assessment of engineering deliverables. Rather than mandating office presence because managers felt they'd "lost visibility," Teradyne built managerial capability to lead effectively regardless of location, maintaining engineering productivity while expanding geographic talent access beyond its Massachusetts headquarters.

Building Long-Term Organizational Resilience and Talent Advantage

While the previous section addressed tactical interventions, building sustainable competitive advantage in talent markets increasingly requires deeper organizational transformation. Forward-looking organizations are developing long-term capabilities that transcend the specific question of office attendance to address fundamental shifts in employee expectations and labor market dynamics.

Strategic Talent Access and Geographic Expansion

One of the most significant strategic costs of strict RTO mandates is the constraint they place on talent pool access. Organizations requiring five-day office presence can only hire people willing and able to commute daily to specific office locations. This geographical constraint becomes increasingly expensive in tight labor markets for specialized skills.

Research demonstrates that certain technical specialties, language capabilities, or domain expertise concentrate in specific geographic regions (Moretti, 2012). Organizations limited to hiring within commuting distance of existing offices may simply lack access to the talent they need, regardless of compensation offered. The evolution of work-from-home arrangements has dramatically expanded the potential talent pool, with Barrero and colleagues documenting that approximately 60 million U.S. workers could potentially work from home, creating unprecedented opportunities for geographic talent matching (Barrero et al., 2023).

Forward-looking organizations are developing intentional strategies for geographic talent access. This involves several components: infrastructure for seamlessly integrating distributed employees; recruiting capabilities for identifying and assessing talent regardless of location; compensation frameworks that adjust for local labor markets rather than imposing headquarters-based pay scales; and cultural norms that treat distributed employees as full organizational members rather than exceptions or second-class participants.

Some organizations are establishing remote-first hubs in talent-rich regions without requiring relocation to traditional headquarters. These hubs provide local community and occasional in-person connection while maintaining flexibility about daily attendance. Others are implementing work-from-anywhere policies that eliminate geographic constraints entirely, treating talent access as a competitive advantage rather than a concession.

The strategic question becomes: would an organization rather compete for the limited talent within commuting distance of existing offices, or access the global talent pool for critical capabilities? Organizations like GitLab and Zapier have built entirely distributed workforces, hiring based purely on capabilities rather than geography, and report access to talent they could never attract to single office locations.

Psychological Contract Recalibration and Trust Building

The mandate backlash experienced by many organizations reflects a deeper challenge: the psychological contract between employers and employees has fundamentally shifted, but organizational systems and leader mindsets often haven't kept pace.

Traditional psychological contracts emphasized security and advancement in exchange for loyalty and presence. Knowledge workers increasingly expect autonomy, flexibility, and purpose in exchange for high performance and skill development (Rousseau, 1995). The research on psychological contracts demonstrates that when organizations violate these implicit agreements—such as by reversing previously offered flexibility—employees experience reduced commitment, lower performance, and increased turnover intentions. Mandates that ignore this shift trigger contract violations and the attendant costs in engagement and retention.

Building long-term resilience requires explicit psychological contract recalibration. This means openly discussing the mutual expectations in the employment relationship, acknowledging that these have changed, and designing organizational systems that reflect new realities rather than nostalgically recreating pre-pandemic norms.

Key elements include: transparency about the value exchange (what the organization commits to providing, what it expects in return); emphasis on performance and growth rather than tenure and presence; acknowledgment of whole-person wellbeing as a legitimate organizational consideration rather than an individual responsibility to be managed outside work hours; and bidirectional accountability where organizations hold employees accountable for results while employees can hold organizations accountable for commitments around flexibility, development, and fair treatment.

Organizations that successfully navigate this recalibration often discover that the new psychological contract, while different from historical norms, is actually more conducive to high performance. When employees feel trusted and treated as autonomous professionals, they often respond with higher discretionary effort and commitment than when subjected to presence-based monitoring.

Data-Informed Continuous Adaptation

A final long-term capability distinguishing successful organizations from those struggling with workplace transformation is the capacity for data-informed continuous adaptation. Rather than treating workplace policy as a one-time decision to be announced and enforced, these organizations implement continuous feedback systems that track leading indicators of organizational health and adapt based on evidence.

This requires several capabilities: metrics beyond simple utilization rates, including collaboration quality, innovation output, employee engagement, and talent retention broken down by team and role; experimental mindset willing to pilot different approaches and learn from failures; rapid feedback loops that surface problems quickly rather than waiting for annual surveys; and willingness to differentiate based on what data reveals rather than mandating uniform approaches for simplicity.

The emphasis on measurement and continuous improvement reflects broader lessons from organizational change research (Kotter, 1996). Successful transformations involve creating short-term wins, building on those successes, and anchoring changes in organizational culture. Applied to hybrid work, this means continuously measuring what matters—productivity, innovation, engagement, retention—and adapting approaches based on evidence rather than assumption or peer pressure.

Companies investing heavily in workplace analytics use aggregated and privacy-protected collaboration data to understand which work patterns drive outcomes. These insights inform recommendations about when in-person time adds value rather than defaulting to blanket mandates. The approach treats workplace effectiveness as a continuous improvement challenge requiring data and experimentation rather than a policy compliance issue requiring enforcement.

Organizations building this capability position themselves to adapt as work continues evolving with technological advancement, generational turnover, and competitive dynamics. Rather than fighting to preserve pre-pandemic norms or rigidly adhering to current arrangements, they develop the agility to evolve with evidence about what actually drives performance.

Conclusion

The evidence is clear: return-to-office mandates carry substantial hidden costs that leaders systematically underestimate when defaulting to policy enforcement over capability building. These costs include adverse selection that disproportionately loses high performers, psychological contract violations that erode trust and engagement, equity impacts that disproportionately burden caregivers and underrepresented groups, and strategic disadvantage in talent-competitive markets where flexibility has become a decisive factor.

The pattern repeating across industries is striking. Organizations that approach hybrid work as a policy challenge—defining mandates, monitoring compliance, threatening consequences for non-adherence—consistently struggle with resistance, attrition, and engagement erosion. Meanwhile, organizations that approach hybrid work as a leadership capability challenge—investing in outcome measurement, developing manager skills, reimagining workspaces, and building trust—often discover competitive advantages in talent access, retention, and performance.

The critical insight from recent research is that hybrid work itself is not the problem (Elliott et al., 2025). The problem is treating a complex organizational transformation as a simple policy question. Bloom and colleagues' foundational work on remote work demonstrated that with appropriate management practices and clear performance metrics, distributed work can match or exceed traditional office-based productivity (Bloom et al., 2015). Successful navigation requires acknowledging that the employment relationship has fundamentally shifted, that talent expectations have evolved, and that competitive advantage increasingly flows to organizations that build the capabilities required for effective distributed collaboration rather than mandating a return to previous norms.

For leaders tempted to respond to peer pressure with stricter attendance requirements, the research offers a clear alternative: measure what matters, invest in how teams actually work, and trust high performers with the autonomy that talent markets increasingly demand. The organizations building these capabilities today are not just weathering a temporary disruption—they're constructing talent advantages that will compound over years as demographic shifts, technological change, and competitive dynamics further reshape the future of work.

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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Associate Dean and Director of HR Programs (WGU); Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD/HR/Leadership Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.

Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2025). The Hidden Costs of Return-to-Office Mandates: How Policy Enforcement Erodes Talent, Trust, and Competitive Advantage. Human Capital Leadership Review, 28(2). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.28.2.2