---
title: "Return-to-office mandates and who leaves (research idea)"
description: "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?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/return-to-office-mandates
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/return-to-office-mandates.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Return-to-office mandates and who leaves (research idea): Remote and hybrid work appear on 53 recent papers, and 18 of them carry a productivity, turnover, retention or performance keyword."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["management", "labor", "human resources"]
keywords: ["hybrid work", "employee turnover"]
---

# 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?

## 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.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| hybrid work | 1 | #2881 | 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1 | 33 |
| employee turnover | 0 | – | 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 4, 1, 0, 3, 0, 0, 2, 5, 1, 4, 0, 1, 0, 2, 3, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0 | 49 |

## 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).