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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

Return-to-office mandates and who leaves

Remote and hybrid work appear on 53 recent papers, and 18 of them carry a productivity, turnover, retention or performance keyword. Large firms have ordered workers back to the office, some for five days a week. Do the mandates raise output, or mostly lose the workers with other options?

managementlaborhuman resources

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 53 papers carry a remote-work, working-from-home, hybrid-work or return-to-office keyword (25 in economics journals, 17 in management): "remote work" on 38, "working from home" on 18, "hybrid work" on 13. Eighteen of them also carry a turnover, retention, quit, attrition, productivity, mandate, performance or innovation keyword; "employee turnover" appears on 17 papers in the archive.

Questions#

  • After a return-to-office mandate, who quits: senior staff, women, caregivers, the best-rated employees?
  • Do measured output and promotion rates change for those who stay, and do the firms hire replacements at higher pay?
  • Do firms that mandate five days differ from those that settle on two or three, and do stock markets react to the announcements?

Data that could help#

Worker-level tenure and exit data (Revelio Labs, LinkedIn), mandate announcement dates, firm reviews (Glassdoor) and job postings with location requirements.

Next step#

Compare exit rates by seniority and gender at firms that announced five-day mandates with matched firms that kept hybrid policies, over the following year.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
hybrid work1#288133
employee turnover0–49

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/return-to-office-mandates.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Return-to-office mandates and who leaves. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/return-to-office-mandates

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-return-to-office-mandates,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Return-to-office mandates and who leaves},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/return-to-office-mandates}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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