Q+A: Bruce Daisley on the return-to-office push | Canada Voices

It’s the new September ritual: Employees begin to fear this is the moment their prized flexible schedules will disappear, five years on from the start of the pandemic.

In mid-August, Ontario Premier Doug Ford ordered provincial government workers back in the office four days a week, starting Oct. 20, and then five days a week beginning next January. Last week, the City of Ottawa also mandated a return to the office as of January, 2026, with the city manager saying five days in-person will boost “organizational culture.”

The government edicts follow a list of employers putting an end to pandemic-era work-from-home arrangements. Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and Dell ordered employees in for five days a week. This fall, four of Canada’s Big Five banks – Toronto-Dominion, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal and Bank of Nova Scotia – will formally institute four days in-person.

The back-to-office push is meeting stiff resistance from employees, many of whom aren’t complying with existing mandates. Today, downtown foot traffic in major cities across Canada remains approximately half of what it was before the pandemic.

The Globe and Mail spoke to Bruce Daisley, technology leader and author of the popular newsletter Make Work Better, about bosses trying to bring back office life like it’s 2019.

Does hybrid work have any staying power left?

We’re in an uneasy equilibrium right now. Equilibrium in the sense that work-from-home rates are not really moving in the data. Uneasy in the sense that there is some generational discord, where older leaders believe that turning to the past might be the best solution. This time last year, we also had lots of discussion about the return to the office. It’s a recursive loop where managers are diagnosing this as the simple answer to their complicated problems.

For employees who’ve enjoyed more flexibility around where and when they work since the pandemic, what are full-time in-office mandates doing to morale?

Goldman Sachs is seeing a huge exodus of top female leaders as they press on with their five day office regime. There is a direct line between flexibility and diversity.

The danger is we leave ourselves with demotivated, unhappy workers who are probably spending as much time thinking about getting a different job as they are about doing the one they’re in.

When people feel that their jobs are being hungry – this idea of a job encroaching into the rest of our life, preventing us from living a full life in other ways – then they respond because they feel infantilized. They feel unseen.

Five years on, remote workers still get teased about their work days – that they’re secretly doing laundry or napping. Less is said about how much time gets squandered in the office: water cooler talk, colleagues gossiping, the lunch hunt downtown. What’s the latest evidence on our productive hours working from home versus in the office?

The Economist pointed to some research finding the productivity of workers doing hybrid work is 4 per cent lower than in the office. But the happiness of them working from home produces enough of a dividend that it’s worth considering. Workers are happier and less stressed when they’re at home doing their job. Being motivated and engaged in our jobs is a really important consideration.

Managers pushing a full return to the office say culture, collaboration and mentorship are stronger in person. What happens when employees find offices that feel nothing like they did in 2019?

One big retail firm I worked with decided they wanted everyone back to the office. Meanwhile, they got rid of half of their office space. People are finding themselves wandering around offices, wondering how they’re meant to get their work done.

There are TikTok memes amongst Gen Z and some millennial workers, where they describe bosses asking them to come into the office to enjoy the “unique” and “energized” culture. Then they post videos of themselves, sitting on a video call silently at their desk. We’ve been promised the party of the year and then people turn up and find they’re in the midst of a silent bureaucracy.

Spending hours to groom and commute to the office, only to sit alone in a meeting room, your colleagues beaming in remotely on a screen – it does feel poorly planned right now.

People spend a reasonable amount of cash and time getting to the office. Then they have the ancillary costs of buying lunch. Money disintegrates buying a coffee. You’ve spent a bundle of cash getting somewhere where you’ve not really spoken to anyone.

We should be honest about those things and say, let’s have fewer days in office but try and design them in a different way. If you want employees around each other for some degree of connection, you need to set aside specific time for that. Most organizations aren’t willing to have that discussion yet.

You mentioned a generational rift around flexible, remote work. Some observers describe bosses who’ve never really had to juggle work and life, so flexibility seems fluffy to them.

There is some data to suggest that when the bosses of organizations are younger, they’re less inclined to ask people to go back to what we did in the past. It’s a strange position to find yourself in, where you suggest that the best way to set up the world in 2026 is to look at what we did in 2019 and try and copy it. It suggests that we can’t have evolution, we can’t have progress.

For managers who want workers back in the office where they can see them, five days a week, how much of it comes down to trust?

A lot of this comes down to a fundamental question at the heart of everything to do with work. Do you believe that workers are generally good? Or do you believe that workers are generally lazy?

What we find is that when we feel empowered, responsible and like we’ve got some opportunity, we tend to lean into it. Gifting people some autonomy makes them feel more energized, motivated and trusted. But if you believe that no one can be trusted, and you have to create rules for them, it becomes self-fulfilling.

This tug of war around when and where we do our work: How long will it persist?

I did an analysis in Britain when the retail store Boots and the media agency WPP demanded workers go back to the office. Neither of those chief executives are still there. It did feel, to an extent, like the dying wish of leaders finding themselves on the wrong side of history. In the aftermath of their leadership switching over, neither of those companies have fully implemented the changes.

It feels like the last remaining places we’re going to observe this is with politicians asserting return-to-office mandates as some sort of legacy of the culture wars. Most commercial businesses have moved on. Absolutely, they want more workplace cohesion. But it’s normally three days in the office, rather than five. It’s an illustration that hybrid is here to stay. It’s just about where you draw the line.

This interview has been edited and condensed.