Government Accountability Office investigators tracked telework at the Social Security Administration from July 2019 through May 2025 and found a sharp cliff after the White House memo. Telework hours fell from 35 percent of total hours in January through March 2025 to 13 percent in April through May 2025, a drop that matched the new posture. That speed matters, because SSA employees had built their lives and budgets around flexibility.
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.
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.'"
Amazon is equipping its managers withpowerful new metricsto monitor their reports with a dashboard that tracks not only whether employees show up to the office, but also how many hours they spend there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The move marks an escalation in the surveillance of white-collar workers at the e-commerce and cloud computing giant.
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.
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.
The company has told US staffers across several large divisions that they will need to return to the office five days a week next year, two affected workers told Business Insider. The return-to-office push, which kicks off in September, will affect US employees across a wide set of roles, including staffers who work on advertising sales, marketing, and product, the employees said.
Start by getting a physical examination to make sure that your body is healthy. Talk to your doctor about how you are feeling, and ask for recommendations to support your new routine. Next, map out things you can do during the workday to up your energy. Typically, people get a bit lethargic after lunch and toward late afternoon. Can you take a 15-minute break right before you normally get sluggish and take a vigorous walk outside your building?
It turns out the return-to-office movement isn't just about productivity, collaboration or company culture. For a significant number of companies, it is about leases - those binding, long-term commitments to office spaces that are now sitting underused while hybrid work proves its staying power. A recent Resume.org survey of 900 business leaders peels back the polished justifications for workplace mandates and reveals the financial tether that's quietly shaping policy: the office lease.
"This is a moment where corporate America is backsliding on women," Sheryl Sandberg, the former Facebook executive who founded Lean In, tells Axios. Despite years of corporate pledges to advance women, 54% of HR professionals surveyed by the group now say women's career advancement is a priority at their organization - and that falls to 46% for women of color. That marks a sharp drop from 2017, when gender equity surged on to corporate agendas after Donald Trump's election and 88% of companies told Lean In it was a high priority.
"We're no longer just designing workplaces, we're actually designing experiences," said Yuen, at the Fortune Brainstorm Design forum in Macau on Dec. 2. "You've really got to make the campus or the workplace more than work, and that's the fun part of it."
Nearly six years after the coronavirus pandemic began, Meta-owned Instagram is bringing its employees back into the office for a full five days a week. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the news to staff in a Monday memo that was then published by journalist Alex Heath's Sources newsletter - Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed its veracity to SFGATE. The five-day order, just for employees under Mosseri, goes into effect Feb. 2, giving employees a couple of more months with their current three-day mandate.
When the world shut down in 2020, Sam Anthony lost the freewheeling life she'd built - full-time house-sitting, stringing together gigs while moving from country to country and city to city. She ended up in Buffalo, New York, a place where she'd gone to high school and sworn never to return. There, despite her initial reluctance, she regrouped, crashing in a student apartment and finding a remote writing job for a travel site.
Late last month, reports surfaced that Microsoft Teams would add a new feature in December of this year, which would pinpoint the location of any employee using the company's Wi-Fi. For example, if your Chicago-based manager has the expectation that you work in the New York office four days a week, but you only make it to the office two days a week, your boss will soon know.
