Rolling back flexibility puts new pressure on future productivity

Return-to-office mandates are back on agendas across Canada and they are provoking strong reactions.

Senior managers argue a shared workplace restores collaboration, culture and client responsiveness. Many employees, especially those caring for children or elders, see rigid mandates as a blunt instrument that ignores real constraints at home and in their communities. Caught in the middle are younger workers, who often say they value flexibility but also need the in-person apprenticeship that accelerates early careers.

Sorting through these tensions requires more than popularity polls about remote work. It calls for looking at what the evidence says about productivity, promotion, mentorship and the national economic context.

Why are senior leaders pressing to bring people in?

Part of the answer is collaboration and knowledge flow. Multiple studies of large organizations found fully remote arrangements tend to make collaboration networks more siloed and static, with fewer bridging ties across teams. Microsoft researchers — using rich metadata from 2020 on email, meetings and chat — concluded firm-wide remote work reduced cross-group connections, which can limit knowledge sharing and innovation. Those effects do not mean remote work is unproductive, but they do speak to a risk that the social fabric of organizations frays when teams never mix in person.

Leaders are also responding to signals about career progression.

During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, several analyses reported fully remote employees were less likely to be promoted or to receive mentoring relative to peers who had regular in-office presence. The Wall Street Journal highlighted new data showing fewer promotions and less mentoring for people at home five days a week, even hybrid workers fared similarly to those in the office full time. While any single study has limits, taken together they reinforce a common managerial intuition that visibility and informal contact still matter for advancement.

At the same time, there is credible evidence remote work can raise individual output in focused tasks.

A randomized experiment at Ctrip, a Chinese travel company, found call centre employees who worked from home increased measured performance and took fewer sick days, although they also experienced a penalty in promotions during the experiment window. The lesson is not that remote is good or bad, but that it changes the balance of outcomes: you might see gains in short-run individual productivity but costs in networking, visibility and the informal learning that feeds longer-run careers.

None of this means mandates are easy or fair for everyone. Caregivers shoulder real constraints that cannot be hand-waved away. Parents of young children juggle daycare hours and school schedules. Adults supporting aging relatives face medical appointments, transportation constraints and the unpredictability of care needs. For many people with disabilities, remote and flexible work arrangements finally opened doors to meaningful employment that was previously out of reach due to accessibility and commuting barriers.

During the pandemic, flexible work allowed millions to stay attached to the labour force who might otherwise have reduced hours or exited altogether. Many Canadian households organized their lives around that flexibility.

Rolling back flexibility without offering child care supports, commuter subsidies or elder care leave will predictably hit caregivers hardest and may undercut participation gains that matter to the broader economy.

Young people entering the workforce deserve special attention. Early careers are powered by osmosis: shadowing a client call, overhearing how a thorny problem gets solved, being pulled into a meeting because you happened to be nearby. Research on collaboration networks suggests remote-only settings reduce the weak ties that carry information across groups. That is exactly the kind of social capital new grads need to build. It is not that mentoring cannot happen online, but the default probability goes down without the micro-interactions that offices generate.

Universities and workforce agencies have leaned into apprenticeship models precisely because structured, work-embedded mentoring raises skill acquisition and employability. For early career workers, a baseline of in-person time is less about nostalgia and more about accelerating learning curves.

A common mistake in this debate is to treat employee preference surveys as definitive proof of what maximizes careers or company performance. Asking people whether they prefer to work from home primarily measures convenience, commute aversion and work-life balance. Those are legitimate and important. But they do not tell us whether a given arrangement leads to faster professional development, richer networks, higher probability of promotion or stronger firm-level innovation.

Several large-sample surveys show workers overwhelmingly want flexibility, while observational and experimental evidence points to mixed effects on advancement and collaboration. Interpreting the first set of findings as a pure endorsement of remote work’s long-run career benefits is a category error. It is the difference between consumer preference and developmental outcome.

This conversation now sits inside a larger national challenge.

Prime Minister Mark Carney and many others have put Canada’s productivity problem squarely on the table. Canada’s labour productivity has sagged in recent years, dragging on real incomes and GDP per capita. The OECD’s 2025 economic survey put Canada well below the United States in output per hour worked and pointed to weak investment per worker as one driver. Statistics Canada data show productivity declines persisted across many provinces through 2024, with only a tentative uptick in early 2025. Productivity is not everything, but in the long run it is the only way to raise living standards.

If we are serious about reversing the slide, we have to ask whether our work arrangements support the hard work, team learning and innovation diffusion that lift GDP per hour.

So where does that leave return-to-office policies? A few conclusions emerge.

First, all-remote models can work well for certain roles and life stages, but they are not a free lunch for organizational learning or promotion equity.

Second, rigid five-days-in mandates impose real costs on caregivers and can backfire if they trigger attrition of experienced staff.

Third, early career workers benefit disproportionately from in-person mentorship.

A pragmatic path is structured hybrid: predictable anchor days for teams, explicit mentoring cadences and real supports for caregiving like onsite or subsidized child care, elder care days and flexible start and end times. Employers need to redesign offices for purposeful work, not presenteeism. (Let’s all say goodbye to the open plan office!)

HR should also track outcomes beyond attendance, including promotions, network breadth for new hires and cross-team project success.

Finally, we should stop pretending popularity alone decides complex policy. Preference surveys tell us what people want on a given day. Evidence on promotions, organizational health and productivity tells us what systems are likely to create opportunity and growth over time.

Canada’s GDP challenge is not going to be solved by where we sit two days a week, but it will be shaped by whether we build workplaces that compound skills, diffuse know-how and attract investment. If return-to-office mandates are to play any role in that, they must be justified by the outcomes that matter and coupled with the flexibility and supports that keep caregivers in the workforce.

The goal is not to turn back the clock. It is to design the next model of work that serves employees at every life stage and strengthens the country’s long-run productive capacity.

Tory McNally, CPHR, BSc., vice-president, professional services,

is a human resource consultant, radio personality and problem solver.

She can be reached at tory@legacybowes.com