From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Kristen Parisi

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Samir from Office Space movie, angry, saying, "why does it say paper jam, when there is no paper jam?!"

Decoding the Future of Work: Insights from Commercial Real Estate Earnings

Despite a record amount of office space available for subleases, experts say the workplace is still relevant.

What commercial real estate earnings suggest about the future of work

Aman Kidwai

Four cartoon employees lined up at a red door with a sign that says "JOB"

Rethinking RTO Woes: Why Layoffs and Increased Monitoring Aren't the Solution

Business leaders are taking cultural risks by enforcing return-to-office mandates with harsh performance reviews and the threat of layoffs.

Layoffs and increased monitoring are not the answer to RTO woes

How to close an office

Not every company can auction things off like Twitter.

Reducing office space can be a complicated process, but it doesn’t have to be

Return to work

Mikaela Cohen

The return-to-office (RTO) conversation is a lot like Russian nesting dolls: seemingly never-ending. Now, it appears the number of RTO holdouts is, like the dolls, getting smaller and smaller.

 32.2% compared to March 2019, a slight improvement from 35.9% in March 2024 and 37.9% in March 2023, according to 

. But last month, office visits reached new heights nationwide, and even more so in a few cities.

In July, visits to US offices were down 21.8% compared to July 2019. Office visits in New York City exceeded 2019 levels by 1.3%, while those in Miami were down 0.1% from its pre-pandemic norm, recent Placer.ai 

. Office traffic in Atlanta and Dallas were down just 14.8% and 18.3%, respectively.

“There’s certainly some seasonality at play here,” said R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at Placer.ai.

The change from March to July could be related to a tendency to go into the office more often in the warmer months, Hottovy told HR Brew. But there may be some larger trends at play unrelated to the weather.

 The cities that have seen office traffic improve, Hottovy said, have also seen RTO mandates. Many New York City 

 like tech and finance have pushed for an RTO, he said, as have some in cities like Atlanta and Dallas.

“Whether it’s tech, whether it’s consumer…office mandates have started to pick up. That’s probably what’s driving Atlanta and Dallas,” he said. “Those are two cities that have seen an increase in population in the last couple years too.”

While office visits have rebounded in Miami and New York City, they’ve lagged in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Office traffic in Denver is down 40%, while that in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago is down 34.6%, 34.2%, and 34.1%, respectively.

“It’s interesting looking at all the different markets. It really feels like there’s different dynamics in each city driving return to office,” Hottovy said.

He does, however, suspect that some cities may see the same rebounds currently in Miami and New York City.

“I don’t think we’re going to get there nationwide,” he said. “But it’s possible some of these other markets that have seen big population increases could get back or above what we were pre-pandemic.”

Split photo illustration of an in office worker and at home worker.

Office attendance returns to pre-pandemic levels in some cities

Just when you thought the RTO debate was over…

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

Even when school’s out for summer, working parents continue to clock in. Summer break can be a headache for caregivers, who may have to cobble together different types of support during these months.

Working parents at AT&T are navigating these challenges for the first time since the company called back employees into the office five days a week. The telecommunications giant had adopted a hybrid model during the pandemic, but began enforcing a full-time RTO policy in January.

To help address employees’ concerns about childcare as they come into the office more often, AT&T decided to pilot a camp program for workers at its Dallas headquarters this summer. The company sees it as one way to test workers’ appetite for on-site daycare, AT&T’s assistant vice president of benefits Matt Phillips told HR Brew.

For 10 weeks, employees with kids aged 4–12 will be able to register for the summer camp, which AT&T is offering through a partnership with Steve and Kate’s Camp, which is owned by care provider Bright Horizons. The camp will be located in AT&T’s “Discovery District,” the area of downtown Dallas where the company is headquartered.

In recent years, AT&T has held focus groups and listening sessions to hear about workers’ childcare challenges, Phillips said. One concern he and his colleagues heard, “loud and clear,” was that “summers are hard.”

As the firm started calling workers back into the office, employees’ needs also evolved, he noted saying, “The more you come into the office, the more there are employees saying, ‘I need care close to work.’” With a hybrid model, employees “had the ability to kind of flex their schedule” to fill childcare gaps, but with full-time RTO, AT&T observed greater needs compared to years past.

Phillips previously heard from Bright Horizons about its success piloting a summer camp program at its Newton, Mass. office, and thought the offering could be a good fit for AT&T employees.

Employees can use backup care—which subsidizes the cost of care for days when unexpected needs arise—to help pay for this program. “We wanted it to be flexible, to be able to kind of use the benefits that we already offer,” Phillips said. With the backup care days, the cost totals $15 a day for one child or $25 for multiple children; otherwise the discounted daily price for the camp is $99.

About 15% of available spots had been filled as of April 25, according to Phillips. He said the company planned to share information about the benefit through channels like its employee resource group for young professionals.

The most common family care benefit employers offer is a dependent care flexible spending account (FSA), which allows workers who are married and file a joint tax return to set aside up to $5,000

pre-tax contributions for expenses like preschool and daycare, according to SHRM. As of 2024, 58% of employers surveyed offered a dependent care FSA, while just 3% offered a subsidized childcare center or program, and 12% offered a childcare referral service.

Though onsite daycare is still a rare benefit, companies like UPS and Tyson Foods now offer it, HR Brew 

. And onsite care is one potential carrot HR leaders can use to encourage workers to come into the office, 

AT&T already offers 10 days of backup care, as well as 15 days of caregiver paid time off. While the company hasn’t yet invested in onsite daycare, Phillips said the camp is one way to test whether this could be a worthwhile benefit for its staff.

“It's a good way to think about care at or near our headquarters,” he said. AT&T already offers discounts and preferred enrollment at Dallas care centers, and onsite care represents a more complex investment. Still, he said, “with more people back in the office, that kind of tips the scale, where probably more people would value that.”

Bright Horizons is seeing more clients experiment with lower-cost childcare benefits, like backup care and summer camp, to help make the case for onsite daycare, said Priya Krishnan, the company’s chief digital and transformation officer. Based on use rates, benefits leaders may be able to make a “business case” for onsite care, she added.

Sadie Funk, national director of the Best Place for Working Parents, which advocates for family-friendly workplace policies, agreed that summer camp benefits may help HR leaders better understand what their employees’ needs are year-round.

“It’s a great way to understand utilization, to understand the value of the benefit,” she said, adding that summer camps may also allow employers to “test out and pilot” care providers to best understand who matches “their culture” and “the needs of their families.”

Close-up of the blue AT&T logo on a storefront.

Following 5-day RTO mandate, AT&T will pilot summer camp benefit

The company hopes the benefit will help it gauge whether on or near-site daycare would be a valuable investment for its employees.

AT&T is piloting a summer camp program as workers’ childcare needs evolve 

The only constant in life is change…and guess what’s probably changing faster than you realize? Your workforce.

Danaya Wilson, co-founder and CEO of BetterCertify, an environmental safety and professional training company, highlights why companies and HR leaders should adopt more flexible practices for working parents in her recently published book, 

Changemakers Wanted: Your Blueprint for Lasting Impact and Ethical Change

Wilson shared insights from her book with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As I got into corporate America, I was seeing a lot of my friends that were women that had advanced degrees…have their children, and then they would exit the workforce. And, I knew why that was happening, but I wanted to know really what the data was behind this, and then how are we going to have more women in leadership positions and build a pipeline for that…We, as business owners, as CEOs, need to increase the amount of flexibility that we have in our organizations, and then the second thing was we need to have a solution for the childcare crisis.

Specific to HR leaders is this idea of individualized, flexible benefit plans…When I’m hiring you, I already know how much it’s going to cost to hire you. We know what your salary is going to be and then the cost to the organization for your benefits. But, what happens when you decide that you don’t want one of those benefits? Let’s say, a partner already has health insurance you’re covered under. You lose that as an employee…What individualized, flexible benefit plans advocate for is this compensation to actually be realized by the employee.

[This] gives HR managers the autonomy to say, ‘Hey, things aren’t working and doing it the way that we’ve always done it, is it beneficial to our employees? And, how can we change that without costing the employer, quite honestly, anything more than they already were going to offer that.’

How can HR help workers amid the childcare crisis?

Acknowledge that it’s even a problem, that there’s reasons why people aren’t returning to the workforce, or returning to the workforce as much as they want to. A lot of our workforce is sidelined because of the cost of childcare…What employers can do is, if they can’t do it on a financial level, can they do it on a flexible level? Can they shift their work hours to allow for a mom to do drop off or dad to do pick up?...Are there small businesses next to where you operate and can you guys go into a stipend at a local daycare center? Or can you [start] an on-site childcare facility?

Do you have advice for HR pros in the midst of an RTO?

Resisting return-to-office mandates also impact women [and] people with disabilities. The reasoning is that you want to have wherever your work is happening, you want everybody to be on a level playing field. And, if you just have women coming to the office only some of the time, but yet, let’s say men, who typically favor going into the office a little bit more. They’re going to be going to the office five days a week, where maybe a woman wouldn’t be going to the office five days, [but] two days a week. And, it really starts to [increase] the possibility for an all-boys club.

For HR managers…transparent conversation [and] communication needs to be at the forefront of everything that you do to make sure that you’re not only considering the needs and wants of your workforce, but also that you’re not allowing for something to be systemic, that maybe you didn’t, of course you didn’t mean for it [to happen], but if we make these huge changes that really disproportionately affect one-half of our workforce, it’s going to cause some ripples down the road.

An interview with Danaya Wilson, author of ‘Changemakers Wanted’

“Transparent conversation [and] communication needs to be at the forefront of everything that you do.”

How HR can better support the evolving needs of working parents

While more and more companies are implementing 

 RTOs, some employees are continuing to work from home.

More than one-fourth (26.8%) of workers whose companies require in-person attendance report doing “some work” remotely on Friday, 

 to WFH Research’s latest Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA). Anywhere from 9.3% to 17.6% said the same for the remaining workweek.

Despite “chatter” around RTOs, and large employers like Amazon and JPMorgan remaining bullish on in-person work, the average amount of time spent working remotely hasn’t changed much in the last few years, Jose Maria Barrero, an assistant professor of finance at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México’s business school in Mexico City and co-founder of WFH Research, told HR Brew.

The percentage of “paid full days worked from home” has hovered around 25% to 30% between January 2022 and February 2025, the SWAA survey found.

This is especially true for knowledge and white-collar workers. Due to the nature of their jobs, many had some flexibility before the pandemic necessitated remote work, Barrero said. So seeing them continuing to do some work at home “isn’t particularly new.”

“People who come into the office regularly have always done work at home to some extent,” he said.

Now, feel free to return your regularly scheduled programming of bouncing between your office, home office, and coffee shop down the street.

Two office workers sit far apart in a room full of empty desks.

Five-day RTO mandates haven’t stopped employees from working remotely

Despite “chatter” around RTOs, the average amount of time employees spend working from home hasn’t dramatically declined.

As HR pros await the verdict in the case of flexible v. in-person work, many are 

 it’ll involve dropping the one-size-fits-all approach.

Business leaders often cite wanting to improve employee collaboration, connectivity, innovation, mentorship, and skill development as reasons to RTO, but a recent 

 from consulting firm McKinsey suggests these goals can be achieved no matter where employees work.

“We can’t just bring people back to the office, and changing nothing else, assume that all of a sudden we get collaboration, or all of a sudden we get connectivity,” Bryan Hancock, a partner at McKinsey, told HR Brew. “It does require practical actions of leaders and of managers to make that happen.”

 Despite many CEOs, like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Amazon’s Andy Jassy, pushing in-office work for collaboration, only 49% of mostly in-person employees reported feeling collaborative, compared to 51% and 55% for mostly remote and hybrid employees, respectively.

Collaboration, Hancock said, comes down to the environment in which employees work, not the number of days they’re in an office. Employers interested in improving collaboration in the office should ensure there are enough desks, dedicated meeting rooms, and flexible spaces, as well as quiet areas for solo work, he recommended.

 disengagement have taken a toll on workplace relationships, with some employees 

 seeking them out, but McKinsey’s data shows most employees still feel some level of connectivity. Some 72% of hybrid employees reported feeling connected to colleagues, while 66% of mostly in-person and 65% mostly remote employees feel the same.

If employees feel disconnected from their peers, Hancock said HR can help by prompting managers to facilitate connection through one-on-one meetings and collaboration opportunities.

 in-person work doesn’t automatically lead to innovation. Only 47% of mostly in-person workers reported feeling innovative, trailing behind 51% and 54% of mostly remote and hybrid employees, McKinsey found.

As with connectedness, Hancock said managers can help improve innovation by “setting the direction, making the ideas come together, and then making sure that team members have the time and space to execute on the new innovative idea.”

Learning and development opportunities can be a 

 recruitment and retention strategy. And they happen to need the most improvement across each work model. Only 52% of hybrid workers reported having L&D access, a percentage that drops to 45% and 43% for mostly in-person and remote employees.

“What we’re seeing across modes is individual employees saying that they would like to see more investment in learning opportunities,” Hancock said. He recommended HR create intentional mentorship opportunities between “novice and expert” employees, and an “apprenticeship culture,” by encouraging employees to learn on the job through coworkers and training programs.

 No matter how a company chooses to work, Hancock said, each of these areas will continue to need improvement.

“We see organizations that we’re working with that are being quite thoughtful on this, thinking through both: What are the underlying management practices that we want to change? And then how do we make sure that our physical environment is making that happen? And if we need to change the physical environment, let’s invest in changing it,” he said.

RTO mandates are not leading to more collaboration, connectivity, or innovation

“We can’t just bring people back to the office, and changing nothing else, assume that all of a sudden we get collaboration, or all of a sudden we get connectivity,” a McKinsey partner tells HR Brew.

More companies are calling employees back into the office five days a week, but workers aren’t convinced full-time RTO is the right move, numerous studies suggest.

Some employees would rather lose a romantic partner or get a divorce than return-to-office five days a week, one 

 on the list of benefits workers receive from a job; in some cases they’d even 

Even so, large employers like Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T 

 with full-time RTO plans. One smaller firm, Cameo, is betting that workers will comply with a four-day-a-week policy, thanks to a raise.

“Elegant solution” to the RTO problem. 

Cameo, a platform where customers pay for personalized videos from celebrities, had not had a formal RTO policy since its employees began working from home five years ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic, CEO Steven Galanis told HR Brew.

But upon realizing its sales team was more efficient working from the office, it started to reconsider its approach to fully remote work.

While Galanis considers Cameo’s Chicago headquarters to be its “center of gravity,” he noted the workforce is distributed, with about half of its 50-person staff based outside of the Windy City. So when the CEO and his leadership team decided to institute a four-day-in-office policy for its Chicago-based employees, they threw in a potential perk for those who complied: A $10,000 raise on their base salaries.

“We felt like we were asking more out of our Chicago employees if we were going to make them come in four days a week,” Galanis said. He described the raise as “an elegant solution to the reality of having a fully distributed team.”

The CEO said everyone covered by the RTO policy complied with it during the first two weeks it was instituted.

While none of Cameo’s remote employees have elected to move to Chicago yet, Galanis said he’s hoping a $5,000 relocation reimbursement might convince some of them to do so.

Galanis—who is based in Miami but works from the Chicago office Monday to Thursday—said working in-person helps foster off-the-cuff conversations that might not happen over Slack. He described a recent 45-minute meeting with one of his senior product managers that occurred simply because he ran into her as he was leaving the office.

“There’s just been great collaboration that’s already paying dividends,” Galanis said.

Both remote work and compensation can engender employee loyalty, a recent FlexJobs 

, though the former beats out the latter. Some 68% of respondents said remote work options would make them more loyal to a company, while 63% said higher pay would make the difference.

More respondents cited remote work as the leading factor when considering a new job (37%) than those who listed salary and benefits as the top consideration (25%).

Even so, offering a pay premium to come into the office might be enough to retain existing talent, or attract new hires, said Toni Frana, a career expert with FlexJobs.

“For some people,” a $10,000 raise “might be enough for them to stay where they are or to accept a job…even though it might not have the exact remote work schedule they were looking for,” she said.

She added that in the case of RTO policies like Cameo’s, where in-office requirements apply to some employees but not others, “it’s important that there is a consistent and conscious effort to make sure that employment and development opportunities, promotion opportunities” are the same across the workforce.

Cameo has a budget for its remote workers to travel to the Chicago HQ once a month, and its VP of people, Adam Ostrum, said the company is continuing to encourage those employees to take advantage of this perk now that their colleagues are in the office most of the time. This way, “it doesn't feel like anyone’s really treated unfairly or left out.”

He said he envisions the $10,000 raise making a difference for younger employees who earn less than six figures, as the pay premium could help them move downtown or pay for pet care, for example. Ostrum also believes being in the office will make a big difference for younger workers’ career development.

“This business has always been built around young, hungry people, especially on the sales side, and we really felt that the best opportunity for them to succeed was to be around their peers,” he said.

Figure in office cubicle with $100 bills stuffed in between the walls. Credit: Illustration: Anna Kim, Photos: Getty Images

Cameo puts its money where its office is 

The video messaging platform is betting workers will comply with a four-day-a-week RTO policy, thanks to a raise. 

Cameo puts its money where its office is with new RTO policy

Since starting his second term, President Donald Trump has made many swift changes.

On his first day, he signed a flurry of executive orders, 

 HR and the workplace. One in particular 

 remote work in the federal workforce, requiring all employees to work in their respective offices five days a week.

More than half (54%) of the federal government’s 2.3 million “civilian” employees already work in person, NPR 

While the mandate only extends to federal workers, it could send a signal to private-sector employers about how they can handle an RTO.

“There is definitely this polarizing trend where we go from one extreme to the other, and now we’re on this other pendulum side of the extreme,” said Susan Leger Ferraro, founder and chief curiosity officer of professional training and coaching firm G3 Works.

By issuing an executive order, Trump is taking an “authoritarian” approach to RTO, Ferraro told HR Brew. “[The administration is saying] ‘You’re going to do what I say you’re going to do, and I don’t care,’” she said.

This may signal to executives that they can do the same, she said, abandoning the authentic, transparent leadership style that has recently become commonplace in corporate America.

Even before Trump’s RTO mandate, companies like 

 had called their workers back to the office, despite some experts’ suggestion that hybrid 

 can achieve the best of both remote and in-person arrangements.

 as a reason for an RTO. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been 

 that its requirement is intended to reduce headcount and, by extension, costs.

This may be a motivating factor for employers looking “to weed out resources,” Sujay Saha, an employee experience strategist and founder of consulting firm Cortico-X, told HR Brew.

Leaders should remember that while an RTO may solve some problems, Saha said it can also create new ones, especially for employees. “It’s been four years, so people have figured out new ways of how they handle certain things,” he said, adding that his company is 100% remote.

Executives committed to an office return should be honest and clear with employees about their reasoning, even if it’s a “brutal reality,” Saha said. And given the seismic effects such a transition can have on employees’ lives, he also recommended being compassionate and understanding, giving, for example, “mental adjustment time” so they can “take care of their lives before you change them.”

The US Capitol Building in Washington, DC.