RTO mandates are running into a space problem

Your mileage may vary on Instagram's recent corporate culture updates (to the extent you care at all). Fewer meetings: excellent. Faster decisions: great. Return-to-office five days a week: woof, but such is life. Return-to-office five days a week when there aren't enough places for people to sit: What??? At least Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is aware of the issue — in a memo to staff, he said New York employees get a pass on the butts-in-seats mandate until the company figures out where all those butts will go. The timeline is TBD.

After the pandemic-driven wave of remote work, many employees are being dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the office. For workers at companies such as Amazon, JPMorgan, and Starbucks, the perpetual workday-in-your-pajamas party is over. The odd wrinkle is that in some cases, it's not just employees who aren't ready to be back at work every day. Their employers aren't ready for it, either, at least logistically. They're telling people to come to the office without having the actual space for them to be there. So, workers are competing for desks, setting up shop in common areas, or refusing to show up altogether until their employers have a more well-thought-out plan. It's emblematic of the broader issues surrounding RTO mandates: Many companies are implementing them without a solid logic as to how or why and alienating their employees — intentionally or not — in the process.

Multiple big-name companies have had some small-time whoopsie daisies on back-to-office space constraints.

In late 2024, AT&T acknowledged in a memo to employees that they would not offer "one-for-one seating per employee" as they were called back in. At the time, employees told Business Insider that workers were filling up hallways or hanging out in the cafeteria in order to check the attendance box. Around the same time, Amazon wound up delaying its RTO ask for some employees because their spots weren't ready. Not only were there not enough desks, but workers also complained that offices and meeting rooms were lacking in chairs.

Having insufficient seating is all part of the plan.

Earlier this year, JPMorgan employees required to come back found themselves in a sort of Hunger Games situation for spots, showing up extra early and leaving behind possessions to mark their spots and signing on from vacation to try to book scarce desk space. On Reddit, some employees described the situation as "pure chaos," and complained of being unable to accomplish work because "half the morning is spent on desk f***ery." One JPMorgan employee told me that they often find themselves seated far away from the rest of their team because someone else reserved their regular spot, and there are often lines for the women's bathroom at the New York office where they work.

How much office space is needed and what to do with it is a perpetual conundrum. Just look at all the hate for open-office floor plans. But the pandemic added more complications to an already complicated situation. As the RTO wave has picked up momentum, space has become a significant issue at many companies, both large and small, including giant federal agencies. So what gives?

Some of it is simply a result of poor planning, explains Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies remote work. Decisions are made at the executive level without proper consultation with facilities personnel, who have detailed information on desks and seating. "It's not as easy as adding up people and comparing to desks, as it matters which cities and offices they are in," he says in an email. "Kind of like airlines that some flights may be overbooked and others half-empty."

Some of the shortages may be on purpose. Strict RTO mandates are often viewed, at least in part, as a soft layoff — companies expect some level of attrition when they force people back, even if they won't openly admit it. "Having insufficient seating is all part of the plan," Bloom says. "If you want a 10% head count reduction, you only need seating for 90% of the folks."

Brian Elliott, the CEO of Work Forward, a future of work think tank and consultancy, says that when executives started to think about bringing people back to the office in about 2021, many were surprised to learn how low the percentage of their workforce actually showing up on a given day had been pre-2020, because of sick time, vacations, workers visiting customers, etc. "So your average CFO looks at this and goes, 'It's a 60% utilized asset on average. Why am I doing assigned seating? Why not go to hoteling and hot desking?'" Elliott says. Add in the belief that at least some sort of remote work would stick around (especially as companies offered it as a perk to attract workers in a tight labor market), and many companies decided to downsize their overall office footprint to save some cash. Now, as businesses decide they want everyone back in full-time, they're realizing they axed too many desks.

However you feel about hotel desking, you might want to get used to it.

Some companies are moving in the other direction, and are on the hunt for more spacious offices. But that process takes time, and economic uncertainty has leaders nervous to go too big. Commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE says economic jitters, high interest rates, and slow growth in in-person jobs has been somewhat of a drag on office leasing activity this year, but the overall trend is up: A growing majority of its office occupants expect to maintain or expand their space over the next three years, while the share anticipating downsizing is steadily decreasing.

"Companies are taking more spaces, so clearly, they are very comfortable in expansionary mode," says Henry Chin, global head of research at CBRE.

That doesn't mean employees should expect to be drowning in spacious offices anytime soon — businesses are driving toward higher people-to-desk ratios, not lower. So instead of a single assigned desk for every person, there are multiple people sharing. Per CBRE, the most common ratio today is 1-1.49 employees per seat, and the plan is to up it. "Ultimately, they want to have the higher ratio, that two or three people share a desk," Chin says.

In other words, however you feel about hotel desking, you might want to get used to it.

The RTO battle in America is proving to be quite the push-and-pull. Remote work is falling, but it hasn't gone away: According to Bloom's tracker, about 25% of work is being done from home in the US, compared to 62% in the spring of 2020, the height of the pandemic, and well under 10% prior to the lockdowns. And just because companies ask workers to come back doesn't mean they're all complying — there's a delta between what employers are asking, and employees are giving, RTO-wise. As the job market weakens, employees may be inclined to give in and commute more. You want your boss to see you enough that they at least feel a little guilty when they fire you.

These space-related headaches are reflective of broader questions about where and how it's best for people to work, and what sort of planning needs to be put into it. Some executives seem to be knee-jerk demanding people come back in without considering whether that's how their teams work best, or whether the infrastructure can handle it. A five-day-a-week office mandate isn't super helpful if teams are located all over the country and everyone's just sitting on video calls all day. Some companies are discovering they need more small meeting rooms, not just a few large ones, so people can gather if they are in the same place. And some are falling short on basic blocking and tackling — having working WiFi, or supplying sufficient monitors and equipment. In the internet age, it's a little tough to get work done when you don't have the internet itself, or a keyboard or a mouse.

Employers may be "conflating productivity and effectiveness with proximity" in insisting people show up full-time, explains Melissa Daimler, a corporate culture consultant. "If I can see you and I know that you're working, then I feel good about how productive we are as a company." Much of the issue comes down to trust — businesses feeling confident that their people will get the work done when they're in the office collaborating and when they're at home for the day. "It takes an extra kind of set of planning skills and a system that you put in place as a company and a team," she says.

The space problem is one that companies should fix, whether they actually will is another question. Your employees aren't going to love the return of long commutes and sad salad desk lunches, whatever you do, but they're probably going to be even more annoyed if, at the end of that commute, they find themselves eating that sad salad on the floor in the hallway, seated next to their laptop.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.