To set myself up for success, I was very strategic about where I chose to live. I realized there were roles that checked all my boxes in the Seattle area, so in early 2024, I decided to move there and stay with a friend to save on rent while applying for jobs.
The findings also indicate that working parents and caregivers (often women), as well as employees with disabilities who require workplace accommodations, are being pushed out. "The probability of more skilled employees departing after RTO mandates is 77% higher than that of less skilled workers, and the probability of senior employees departing after RTO mandates is 36% higher than that of junior workers," said Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh.
Directors and above will be required to be on-site five days a week from February 16, according to an email sent by Stellantis CFO Joao Laranjo on Friday. It states that the decision will improve customer satisfaction, "strengthen our culture of innovation," and create more opportunities for mentorship and skill development. A set of guidelines entitled "Back Together We Win," sent with the email, describes the five-day-a-week RTO as an "enterprise-wide initiative" that will apply to all employees in all regions.
The layoffs affected positions at the home improvement chain's store support center near Atlanta, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. "We're simplifying our corporate operations to better support our stores and our customers," the spokesperson said. "Our goal is to drive greater agility and position the company to move faster and stay even more closely connected with our frontline associates." Home Depot is offering affected employees separation packages and other support, the spokesperson added.
Law firms took nearly 800,000 square feet of New York City office space in Q4 2025, according to data provided to Law.com, with firms including Kirkland & Ellis, Goodwin Procter, and McGuireWoods expanding their Manhattan footprints. Gibson Dunn and Baker Hostetler renewed in place, underscoring that firms are holding onto - and adding to - their office space, not shedding it.
In early January, the Ford government's return-to-office (RTO) mandate took effect, ordering 60,000 public servants back to the office. The move culminates more than a year of RTO mandates from big names in tech and finance, reaching a fever pitch in late 2025, and has put a significant amount of pressure on Toronto's office market. The trend is reversing years of near-stagnant activity in the downtown commercial real estate scene, which took a big hit from COVID-era work-from-home policies.
Several offices have lifted the work-from-home mandate after the pandemic ended, claiming that workers are more productive in offices. A user who goes by u/furrows_diocese-8q shared a post on January 18 about how their sister dealt with the situation when her boss made the same claim. The crew was doing their job well and were content with their prior remote arrangement, but were forced to come to the office.
Paramount Skydance has asked most of its employees to return to the office five days a week, and now it's asking them how in-person work is going. David Ellison's company asked employees to grade its RTO efforts by filling out a quick survey asking for feedback on "what's working well and where we can improve to better support" its staffers.
When large companies require employees to end remote work and return to the office (RTO), the effects typically ripple through local economies and nearby small businesses. There can be more foot traffic and spending at restaurants, cafés, and coffee shops as office workers take lunch breaks or visit shopping districts before or after their shifts. Convenience stores, dry cleaners, food trucks, and gyms can also see an uptick, leading to improved weekday sales and a steadier cash flow.
When Jennifer Vaughan, 55, returned to work as a substitute teacher after her facelift, nobody said anything outright. Vaughan worried, "God, is it not enough of a difference that somebody isn't asking?" However, there were signs her coworkers were just being polite. One teacher did a double take and stammered their way through asking if something had changed. She told a few other teachers, and said, "They were like, 'Okay, I thought something was up, but I wasn't totally sure.'"
I was twenty years old and a college student, which meant that I was quite useless. I found out that it was one kind of torture to do pointless work for two or three hours a day-usually, producing research memos that no one read-and then another kind of torture to figure out how to do nothing until it was acceptable to leave the office at 5 p.m.
Over the last year or so, Silicon Valley made an all-out push for employees to return to the office. Now that the industry has people back at their desks, it's trying to figure out how to make them happy. The influx of office dwellers, including a growing number of Gen Z representatives, has the Valley trying new things, like shoeless offices.
For the first half of this year, Telemarque commuted to the office two days a week in his role as senior manager of deal finance strategy. When management changes tied to the company's merger bumped that up to three days for his team starting in September, Telemarque and his wife began preparing a childcare plan for their four-year-old daughter on the days he'd have to make the 90-minute, one-way commute.
Despite employer policy changes in Fall 2025 requiring more in-office workdays, no significant ridership increase has been observed. In fact, Fall 2025 ridership slightly declined versus expectations,
However, one overlooked impact of return-to-work policies is that they do not account for air quality issues in commercial buildings, The Way Commercial Cleaning notes. This trend, dubbed sick building syndrome, can be detrimental to employees' effectiveness once they get back into the swing of sharing office space. Once understood, it explains why indoor air quality services are increasingly in demand.
They're gonna work very hard. We need to put some guardrails [in] so they don't injure themselves, but I don't think we could prevent them from working hard and still make the kind of games we make.
Bloomberg reports that Naughty Dog has had developers working mandatory overtime as it races to complete a demo of the sci-fi action game for Sony to review, despite a planned release date that's still years away. The mandatory overtime reportedly began in October, with staff being asked to work a minimum of eight extra hours a week and logging them on an internal spreadsheet.
