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In 2020, Laura, who worked in talent acquisition for a global tech company, moved to London with her husband, despite the fact her company was based in Dublin. “At the time, there was no expectation of needing to be in an office,” she tells me. “90 per cent of the people I worked with and hired for were scattered around Europe and the Middle East”. None of her managers batted an eyelid about her location, she says. She was even promoted during that period.
A year or two later, when pregnant with her first baby, a serious crime happened right by her house. It was enough to make her seriously reconsider leaving the capital. Soon after Laura, her husband and their six-month old baby moved to Bath. Still on maternity leave and having a proven track record of remote work, she didn’t even consider that her company might have an opinion about her new home.
Laura and her husband then separated – leaving her, she says, as a single mum in a new city with no weekday childcare help available outside of nursery hours. Then her company brought in an office in-person mandate. “We were given three months’ notice of a mandate for two days a week [in office]. Getting to London even one day a week was impossible and they were insisting on at least two”.
Laura knew there was no way she could make it work logistically, so when notification of voluntary redundancy came up a couple of weeks later, she took it.
If remote working has ever had a moment, then the pandemic was surely it. Despite only 5 per cent of UK workers having work-from-home arrangements pre-pandemic, by April 2020 that number jumped to roughly 46.6 per cent, according to data from the Office of National Statistics. Overnight, flexibility in the workplace, that many campaigners such as Anna Whitehouse, who runs the Flex Appeal campaign had spent years lobbying for, became the norm.
Fast forward to 2025 and the CIPD’s Flexible and Hybrid Working Practices report found 41 per cent of employers believed an increase in home or hybrid working had raised productivity and efficiency (16 per cent believe it had decreased). And 80 per cent of employees said working flexibly had a positive impact on their quality of life, and around one-third said it had a positive impact on their career prospects. It would be disingenuous to suggest that there aren’t any drawbacks. A 2025 note by the US Federal Reserve looked at what it called the “productivity puzzle”, pointing to compromised team cohesion, breakdowns in communication, increased risk of burnout and greater isolation for employees.
But after years of moving towards hybrid working, things seem to going backwards with more employers mandating returns to the office (even when they don’t necessarily have the space to accommodate everyone at the same time).
Big tech companies like Amazon, which requires workers to be in five days a week, and the Metropolitan Police, which mandates three days a week, are enforcing a return to office-based work. A report conducted in September by KPMG found bosses were considering a range of methods to track in-person attendance such as offices cameras and under-desk sensors.
It’s a trend that has come as quite a surprise for some people, like Isla, a 40-year-old who works in public health and lives with her husband and two small children in the North East.
“[In the pandemic] we lived in London in a small place,” she says, “and my partner owned a flat in Glasgow. His tenants had given notice. We then decided to get married and start trying for a baby.” They moved up north. By the time their daughter was born, their office in London had still not reopened.
Eventually, when it did, the company was “very relaxed” about them continuing to work remotely. “While I was on mat leave with our second, they updated their hybrid work policy, but it was still at that point quite flexible. “They said, ‘We expect you to come in a bit, you can figure it out’”, she says.
It wasn’t until she returned to work after her second child that everything changed. “They said, ‘Right, nobody’s coming in enough’ and mandated two days in the office for every single person.” Given the family’s changing circumstances and the fact that both she and her husband were on the same team, this change quickly became untenable.
They had no local childcare and suddenly had to try to make both of them spending two days a week in London work (as well as travel time). “It’s three hours door to door, she says. “I leave the house at 7.30am on a Wednesday morning and I get home at 10pm and then my husband leaves at 7.30am on Thursday morning and also gets home at 10pm which is, as you can imagine with the kids, really tough – and even more crazy because we end up just on zoom to each other all day.” To add insult to injury, they are spending a fortune on trains and often finding the office is empty.
McCartney says when it comes to mandating office returns, it’s important for organisations to have a clear and evidence-based rationale and to be mindful of employees’ different circumstances. She also recommends checking your contract before instigating any discussion, because “if your normal place of work is listed as the office, your employer can usually ask you to attend”.
”However, every employee has a legal right to request flexible working from the first day of employment, and employers must handle the request reasonably and respond within two months […] if your request isn’t accepted, it might be useful to discuss alternative types of formal or informal forms of flexible working,” she says. “Organisations can also look at other support to help people return to offices, such as season ticket loans as part of the overall benefits package, which can reduce the cost of commuting.”
Despite trying to raise their issues with their employer, Isla and her husband have made very little progress. They both have considered moving back to London, but in the years that the office has been closed and then partially so, their children have grown roots and are very happy and settled where they are. Because of this, Isla feels there is little choice but to leave her job and try to find something more flexible. “It is so sad because we worked remotely for five years, and it didn’t affect the quality of the work at all,” she says.
On balance, Laura feels lucky she was able to accept redundancy, which included a payout. But she shares Isla’s frustration at how the process was handled and what she felt was presenteeism. “The biggest kicker was that no one I worked with daily was based in London, or even in the UK… so I would have been travelling to do team calls from the office,” she says.
It is a situation that Simon, a 38-year-old software engineer who lives in the South West and left his last job in part because of this issue, knows all too well. “My job was advertised as fully remote but there was an expectation eventually that I would make the effort to come into the office for certain meetings,” he tells me. But when he did, the experience was often frustrating. “The meetings were poorly organised,” he says. “The CEO was always late to them and attendance was patchy […] some people would come in, but some would dial in, and the latter couldn’t hear what was going on in the room, so it was largely a waste of time for them.”
McCartney says that while much focus is placed on remote and hybrid working, this is just one form of flexible working. “More broadly, organisations need to be thinking more creatively about different forms of flexible working that support employee performance, including options for the high proportion of employees that are in non-office or front-line roles.”
Simon credits his current company for approaching hybrid working well. “It’s done properly,” he says. “Everyone is only expected in the office two days a week, and everyone comes in on the same days – unless you live far away, when it isn’t mandated,” he says. “You get to see people, to connect properly and build relationships more easily.
“I think that does matter, and I understand organisations wanting to recruit on the basis of staff being able to come in sometimes,” he continues. “If not done properly (e.g. if everyone comes in on different days) or if it extends to the whole week, I think it’s a net negative. We’re blessed with the ability to work remotely now, and that has significant benefits for some people – we should take advantage of it without losing the benefits of face-to-face”.
