How businesses can get people to come back to work without firing them or making them quit quietly

The first time I watched an RTO mandate burn goodwill, it was not because people hated offices or because the policy asked for too much. It was because the rule seemed to bend around a few chosen people. Leadership called it flexibility. Everyone else called it favoritism. That week we kept our laptops open later, but the energy in the room fell silent. You can recover from a bad schedule. You do not recover as easily from a broken sense of fairness.

Across sectors, big names have pulled employees back into offices, and the mixed results tell a simple truth. RTO is not a single decision. It is a chain of design choices that either line up or fight each other. When those choices fight, your culture pays the bill in morale, motivation, and attrition. Experts who spend their days studying work behavior keep circling the same risk. Unequal enforcement does more damage than strict rules ever will because it tells your team that power, not purpose, decides who follows what. It also creates “compliance without commitment,” which is a clean way of saying people do the minimum and watch for the exit. Gartner’s 2024 survey of employees and managers across multiple countries put numbers on that feeling. Mandates made people less likely to stay and increased quiet quitting. Founders do not need a macro report to recognize the pattern. A team that is present but mentally absent is a team that will not ship.

If you are considering a policy shift, start from a founder’s question. What behavior do you need more of, and what behavior can you afford to lose? RTO becomes clearer when you admit the tradeoffs. In-person time can speed decisions, rebuild weak social ties, and train new hires faster. Remote time protects deep work, reduces commute fatigue, and broadens your hiring pool. Your goal is not to choose a winner. Your goal is to design a rhythm where the benefits compound instead of cancel each other out.

The first design choice is pace. Five days back feels decisive on paper, but it spikes resistance, and resistance becomes politics. The teams that move from two to three days and hold the line long enough for new habits to form see fewer cultural scars. When you step up gradually, you give people time to redesign childcare, elder care, and recovery time. You also give managers space to fix meeting rot and rebuild on-site workflows so an office day is not just remote work performed at a desk in town. The people who say “RTO does not work” often ran a marathon at sprint pace and called the outcome inevitable.

The second choice is purpose. Ask a blunt question before you set any schedule. Why are people coming in, and what must happen in the room that cannot happen on a call? If your answer is “culture,” you are not done. Culture is not an activity; it is a by-product of doing meaningful work together. Give office days a job. Co-design sessions. Live architecture reviews. Complex onboarding. Sensitive feedback conversations. Cross-team decisions that used to bounce for weeks. If you cannot name work that belongs in person, your team will sit in open plan noise and wonder why their commute funds other people’s calendar control. Dell’s response to sound complaints with noise-defending gear is a reminder that environment shapes behavior. The fix is to engineer the context, not tell people to try harder inside a bad one.

The third choice is enforcement. This is where most RTO stories go sideways. Founders design a rule, then quietly grant exceptions to high performers, tenured staff, or noisy dissenters. They think they are being pragmatic. The team reads it as hierarchy first, fairness second. You can set different schedules by role if the role logic is transparent and tied to work type. You cannot set different schedules by preference without paying a trust tax. If an engineer and a designer have different on-site needs, write it down and explain why. If a senior IC gets a pass because they “earned it,” you are teaching your juniors that rules are a ladder, not a system. That is how resentment becomes the company’s unofficial language.

The fourth choice is who carries the mandate. Senior leaders announce policy. Middle managers make it real. Many RTOs fail because the people with the hardest job were the last to be trained. If a manager only has a date to enforce and no playbook to run, they enforce the date and brace for fallout. Equip managers to design a local model within global guardrails. Give them templates for team-level agreements, criteria for exceptions, and coaching on conflict that does not escalate into punishments. When a manager can say, “Here is what we are solving for, here is what we can flex, here is what we cannot,” they preserve trust even when an answer is “no.” Without that clarity, every conversation becomes a negotiation, and every negotiation becomes a rumor.

The fifth choice is feedback. RTO becomes less political when you put data behind it and share that data regularly. Not vanity metrics like badge swipes, but work outcomes that matter. Cycle time on decisions that require cross-function input. Onboarding checkpoints for new hires. Defect rates after live review weeks. Engagement signals from skip-level conversations. Show the team where in-person time is pulling its weight and where it is not. Then adjust openly. When people see the loop from data to decision to change, they understand that RTO is a system under review, not a decree you defend at all costs.

There is also a human rhythm you cannot ignore. People do not only work. They commute, parent, recover, and live with individual energy profiles. Leaders who understand the beat of a workday reduce friction by design. If open plan noise kills focused tasks, remove focused tasks from office days instead of forcing deep work into a loud room. If the temptation to stack calls from nine to six wastes the value of being co-located, set office hours with protected collaboration blocks and no-meeting windows. You can ask adults to be adults. You cannot ask them to do deep work in conditions built to block it.

A word about exceptions. Every rule needs a clean path for edge cases. The path should be documented, time-bound, and reviewed. It should also require a trade. If someone requests a different cadence for caregiving or health reasons, meet them with dignity and clarity. But keep the system whole by making the exception a structured agreement with a revisit date. Exceptions without structure breed folklore. Folklore kills trust faster than any single policy.

Founders in Southeast Asia and the Gulf already know how much culture and infrastructure shape what is possible. Transit reliability, housing patterns, and extended family roles change the cost of each office day in ways a spreadsheet does not capture. Do not import a model without tuning it to your operating reality. Your goal is not to match a global headline. Your goal is to build a repeatable rhythm for your actual team in your actual city with your actual constraints.

When you put it all together, RTO becomes a test of leadership maturity. Move in steps that stick. Tie office time to work that needs a room. Enforce rules with role-based logic that anyone can explain. Train and trust your managers to localize within guardrails. Measure what matters and share it. Keep a structured path for exceptions. That is what RTO done right looks like. It is not soft. It is serious. It respects people and it respects outcomes. Most of all, it treats culture like a system you design on purpose, not a mood you announce and hope will hold.