A return-to-office policy is not a culture strategy. The question is not whether people are in the office two, three or four days a week, but whether that time has a clear purpose. Organisations need to stop treating attendance as the outcome and start asking what office time is actually for.
Dr Amanda Jones, Reader in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at King’s Business School
10 June 2026
Return-to-office rules risk creating 'worst of both worlds' for hybrid workers
King’s Business School researchers suggest employers should move beyond counting office days and focus instead on designing hybrid work that is clear, coordinated and purposeful.
New research from King’s Business School suggests return-to-office policies can create an unexpected problem for hybrid workers. Employees may retain considerable freedom over where they work, but the positive experience of that freedom can be undermined when organisations change office expectations without clearly endorsing remote work or consistently enforcing office attendance.
The research, published in Human Resource Management, examines how hybrid workers respond when organisations introduce or tighten office attendance requirements. It comes as employers continue to debate whether office mandates improve collaboration, culture and productivity.
The research suggests many organisations may be focusing on the wrong measure. Employees may still be doing what they choose to do, but no longer feel they are working in the way they prefer. As office conditions and expectations shift, hybrid work can become harder to plan, coordinate and use effectively.
Rather than improving how people work together, return-to-office policies can create a “worst of both worlds” scenario. Employees may not significantly change where they work, but can still be left navigating uncertainty, frustration and poorly coordinated hybrid work.
In the paper, Professor Michael Clinton, Dr Tara Reich, Dr Amanda Jones and Huiyu Wu draw on multiple studies of UK hybrid workers, including survey data and interviews collected over two years.
They found that employees often retained considerable freedom over whether they came into the office. However, that freedom did not always translate into a better experience of work.
Instead, unclear or inconsistently applied policies left employees uncertain about what was expected, frustrated by travelling into quiet offices, and struggling to coordinate with colleagues whose attendance patterns remained unpredictable.
The study found that the amount of time spent in the office was not, in itself, linked to better wellbeing. What mattered more was whether employees felt they had meaningful choice over where they worked, and whether their working arrangements helped them do their jobs effectively.
The findings suggest employers may need to rethink how they judge hybrid working. Rather than focusing on attendance rates alone, the research points to the importance of clear expectations, coordinated office time and shared norms around when teams should come together.
Read the full paper, Enforced but not enacted: How return-to-office policies reshape boundary enactment, work-location volition, and eudaimonic wellbeing, in Human Resource Management.
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Reader in Organisational Behaviour and The Future of Work Education
Professor of Work Psychology
Reader in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management
PhD Student in HRM & Employment Relations