Has in-office work fully bounced back?

The majority (87%) of job listings on career platform JobLeads are for roles that require workers to be fully onsite, according to January data from the site—7% offer a hybrid option and 6% are remote. The amount of occupied office space is also on the rise, reaching 55.1 million square feet in 2025 Q4, according to December data from commercial real estate firm JLL, up from 30 million at the end of 2020. (It’s still, however, down from 70 million in 2019.)

Many return-to-office (RTO) mandates represent a “mismatch” between what employees and companies want, Martin Schmidt, co-founder and managing director of JobLeads, told HR Brew. “American employers are being more aggressive on return-to-office,” he said, creating “tension” in the workforce.

For more on why corporate America is still talking about RTO, keep reading here.—MC

The last conversation HR has with an employee shouldn’t also be the first.

“By the time someone is sitting with me in an exit interview…we hopefully have a relationship in place, we have built trust, and ideally I’m not hearing about any big theme for the first time,” Jaime Petkanics, chief people officer at vitamin-maker Gruns, said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast. “An exit interview is great, all feedback is a gift, but ultimately the most useful feedback is the feedback you get when there’s still something you can do about it.”

She sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, to discuss her exit interview strategy, and the one question she wishes she could ask outgoing employees.

For more from our conversation with Petkanics, keep reading here.—VV

Walmart is paying $100 million to settle allegations from the Federal Trade Commission and 11 states that it deceived delivery drivers about pay and caused them to lose tens of millions of dollars worth of earnings.

The complaint alleges Walmart made “false representations” to drivers in its Spark merchandise delivery service by inflating base pay, misrepresenting conditions for incentive pay, and falsely claiming drivers would receive 100% of tips going back to 2021. “Labor markets cannot function efficiently without truthful and non-misleading information about earnings and other material terms,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.

In addition to the settlement, Walmart is required to implement a program to ensure drivers are paid the promised earnings and tips, prohibited from modifying base pay after the initial offer, and banned from misrepresenting earnings information sent to Spark Drivers.

For more on the allegations and settlement, keep reading on Retail Brew.—AV

New data shows unlimited PTO leads to more time off in Europe—but barely moves the needle in North America. Here’s what cultural norms reveal about designing global time-off policies.