Photo: Casey Steffens
In 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, the global advertising conglomerate WPP started to slash almost one-third of its New York office space. Different WPP agencies maintained separate Manhattan headquarters: Ogilvy was on 11th Avenue, Grey on lower Fifth, VML in Columbus Circle. But those buildings were all empty, and there was no telling when or if the thousands of employees who had once worked in them would return. WPP’s corporate leadership had long been trying to break down the walls between its subsidiaries by putting them together on corporate campuses, and a five-year strategic plan, developed with the consultants at McKinsey & Company and announced in late 2020, estimated it could reduce its global real-estate costs by consolidating offices. “COVID really supports the space agenda we’ve had for years,” the executive who then managed WPP’s American real estate told a New York trade publication in December 2020. “People don’t need a desk just to put pictures on it.”
Remote work appeared, at first, to be that rare thing in corporate America: an efficiency measure that made both management and employees happy. Mark Read, WPP’s chief executive, says it “amazed everybody” to discover the business of advertising could be done from home. Based on preliminary evidence, both sides made permanent decisions. Some workers bought houses far outside the city, or left the New York area completely. WPP gradually moved most of its New York agencies into an airy “vertical campus” occupying 13 stories in 3 World Trade Center, which it had originally opened in 2018 as a headquarters for two of its firms. They would all have less space but more flexibility. The company’s “hybrid work” policy gave employees latitude to come in rarely, or not at all.
By last year, though, Read says he came to believe that remote work was no longer working. “I just don’t believe you can do our job on the end of a video screen,” Read says. “I think people’s attention wanes, and they’re not fully present.” When he visited WPP’s offices around the world, he perceived that “those offices that were doing best were also those offices that were the busiest.” When he examined the data, he says he saw that in-person attendance appeared to correlate with employee satisfaction, as measured by internal survey results, and also financial performance. But attendance varied across the more than 100 companies that WPP owns. “The challenge was that without a mandate, it was very hard,” Read says. “People weren’t coming in, and if people weren’t coming in, people didn’t see the benefit of being together.”
Read’s realization came at a moment of atmospheric change in office culture. For the first few years after the pandemic, a period of fast economic recovery and labor scarcity, workers had leverage to demand a great deal from their employers. Companies pledged to respect work-life balance, personal growth, and mental wellness, and offered perks like online meditation sessions. They also liberated workers from the bonds of the office. Some bosses embraced remote work wholeheartedly as a transformational (and economical) change; others allowed it grudgingly, issuing unenforced attendance guidelines and turning a blind eye to Zoom backgrounds. Across sectors, though, CEOs are now getting tough and reclaiming their authority by imposing mandatory return-to-office policies. At WPP, the summons came down in a January memo entitled “Winning Together,” in which Read extolled the intangible benefits of “human connection, creativity, and relationships,” before laying down the new law to his more than 100,000 employees worldwide: Come in at least four days a week, starting in April.
“The initial response was quite polarizing,” Read says, with considerable understatement. Decrying the “mental and social effects” of “rigid work regimes,” a group of WPP employees started an online petition, which has collected more than 20,000 signatures. “I’ve yet to speak to a single colleague who is happy with the four-day return-to-office,” one executive told the marketing industry website the Drum. Another said: “It has left us reeling.”
A similar dynamic has played out in workplaces across New York City: at banks, at media organizations, and even at formerly footloose tech firms. In January, JP Morgan and Amazon, announced or implemented five-day return-to-office policies, putting an end to the remote-work experiment. The law firm Sullivan & Cromwell reportedly instructed its associates to be in the office from at least 9:30 to 5:30, Monday through Friday. Companies large and small have been quietly upping the number of days they require their employees to be in — a phenomenon known as “RTO creep.”
RTO creep is reflected in a variety of statistical measures of the city’s business — and busyness. The Real Estate Board of New York’s monthly office-visitation report, which draws on mobile-device tracking data, hit a post-pandemic high last December, surpassing 80 percent of what it was in 2019 if you exclude the final holiday week. New Jersey Transit reports that its regional rail-system ridership is about 75 percent of what it was before COVID, with peak midweek trains carrying as many passengers as before. The MTA’s commuter trains report comparable ridership figures. For the past few months, office leasing activity has been as consistently strong as New York has seen since the pandemic-era commercial real-estate crash. Beyond the numbers, you can see evidence of RTO creep in the desultory line at the salad bar, the quiet that has descended on the gym on a Monday morning, and an uptick in desperate group-chat pleas for after-school carpools. Office work is not all the way back to what it once was, but the trend is moving in one direction with disorienting speed, without much regard for life or balance. The most extreme return-to-office mandates can, in some cases, leave employees with less permission to work from home than they enjoyed before the pandemic.
Tonally, if the first half of the 2020s brought out the human side of human resources, the back end may belong to Elon Musk, the billionaire and return-to-office zealot who has used mandates as a blunt instrument to purge workforces, first at Twitter and now within the federal bureaucracy. C-suite executives, unleashing their inner Elons, are feeling emboldened to bark: Get back to work! And they are sending messages that they really mean it this time, letting their employees know they are keeping track of turnstile badge swipes and using other surveillance measures to track compliance. Workers can complain — and they do, loudly — but the hard truth is, they have little room to resist the reversal. Now that the job market has cooled and a recession is looming, power has shifted back to employers, who are showing who’s boss.
Like all utopian experiments, work-from-anywhere was never as universally beneficial as advertised. The phenomenon was terrible for New York City, which lost tax revenue, small businesses, and tens of thousands of residents it has yet to recover. Many of the city’s top executives were quick to return to work in person after the lockdown, and were confronted each day with the sight of many empty desks. “We have a lot of space,” says Brad Karp, the chair of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, which rents 675,000 square feet in a skyscraper on Sixth Avenue and resisted incentives to downsize. “When it was unoccupied during COVID, it was very, very jarring.”
In February, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, gave voice to the long-festering frustration of many of his peers. At a company town hall at a satellite office in Ohio, a JP Morgan IT worker asked Dimon if he might allow managers some flexibility to make exceptions to his new five-day office mandate. “I’m going to give you a complete answer,” Dimon replied. “There is no chance that I would leave that up to managers. Zero chance. The abuse that took place was extraordinary.” Then Dimon let loose a profane rant. “We also had — and you know I’m right about this one — a lot of you were on the fucking Zoom and you were doing the following: looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an asshole the other person is, not paying attention, not reading your stuff, and if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness — it does.” Dimon railed against unofficial three-day weekends — “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get ahold of” — and said that anyone who disagreed with his new policy could find other employment.
“You don’t have to work at JPMorgan,” Dimon said. “It’s a free country, you can walk with your feet. But this company is going to set our own standards and do it our own way. I’ve had it with this kind of stuff. I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since COVID, and I come in, and — where is everybody else?”
Audio of Dimon’s tirade went viral, inspiring a predictable uproar on social media and secret delight among the many bosses who shared his cynical assumptions about what their subordinates really were up to on their remote days. David Solomon, Dimon’s counterpart at Goldman Sachs, liked to tell the story of the time he ran into a group of junior bankers lunching at a Hamptons restaurant one COVID summer workday, at a time when Goldman’s offices were mostly closed for social distancing. Goldman was one of the first New York companies to summon employees back in 2021, overriding work-life balance complaints from its younger employees. Even a notoriously demanding boss like Solomon, however, has run into problems enforcing his mandate, forcing the bank to periodically circulate unfriendly reminders to its staff. It’s a common issue: A 2024 office-tenant survey by the commercial real-estate firm CBRE found that only 17 percent of organizations have a policy that they actively enforce.
Inconsistency in both expectations and compliance has created an uneven state of affairs in New York. Firms in some industries, like finance and real estate, issued RTO edicts years ago, and are now more or less back to their pre-pandemic routines. (Even before Dimon’s mandate, around 70 percent of JP Morgan employees were coming in five days.) In the realm of big law, attitudes surrounding office work were slower to revert and still vary from firm to firm, in part because they were run by committees of partners, some of whom have very much enjoyed their independence. (A recent survey of more than 1,000 law firm partners conducted by the BTI Consulting Group found that 50 percent were adamantly opposed to return-to-office mandates.) Creative sectors that embraced the work-from-anywhere ethos, like software design, media, and advertising, have been slowest to junk the hybrid model. Some in this realm, like the book publisher Random House and Vox Media — this publication’s parent company — still have no uniform company-wide attendance requirement. But increasingly, they are outliers. The Atlantic told its staff in January that they would soon be required to be in the office three days a week. The magazine company Condé Nast imposed a four-day office mandate that took effect earlier this month. The Washington Post has ordered its reporters to be back in the newsroom five days a week in June.
Remote workers will often say they find they get more done at home. “I don’t think personal productivity is the only metric of success in our business,” Read replies. “How many emails you answer, how many Teams calls you do — business is more than that. It is also mentoring, training, coaching, motivating, and all those things are much easier to do, and in some cases you can only do them, if you are together.” Managers are also aware that some percentage of their employees abused their lack of supervision. Some took on side gigs. Some just checked out. Ironically, autonomy also seemed to make workers more discontented. Vanessa Akhtar, a managing director at the consulting firm Kotter who specializes in workplace performance, says that many companies have been alarmed to see scores on their internal workplace engagement surveys plummet, with respondents indicating they are isolated and mistrustful of leadership. Forcing employees to return to offices, she says, “is one way to almost coerce personal engagement.”
“I believe it is nearly impossible to develop a culture remotely,” says Karp, who announced a four-day-a-week policy for Paul Weiss in early March. Other big law firms — Skadden, Weil Gotshal, Davis Polk, Vinson & Elkins — have implemented similar four-day mandates, and each time it’s happened, the industry website Above the Law has published a post in which anonymous tipsters bitch about the decision. “Associates are furious, many are looking into quitting,” one source at Sullivan & Cromwell told the blog after news leaked on Reddit that the firm was now requiring junior attorneys to be in five days a week, absent extraordinary circumstances. But Karp says that, in the case of Paul Weiss, his push to return to an office was supported by a committee of the firm’s associates, who recognized that interaction with their superiors created more opportunities for mentorship and advancement. For that to occur, senior people also have to be present. “It really only works effectively if the partners are there,” Karp says. And that is why a universal mandate was necessary.
In the first years after the pandemic, anecdotal evidence suggested there was a generational gap in attitudes about the necessity of the office, with younger workers taking the fullest advantage of the freedom of remote work. If anything, employers now say, that dynamic has reversed. Zoomers who had little previous experience of the office have realized it is easier to be recognized for your work if your boss recognizes your face. “It was clear that the people who weren’t coming in were not advancing,” says the managing partner of a large New York architecture firm. “As promotions came through, I think they saw that the people who were there were more successful.” Now the people who are more resistant to recalibrating their routines, in this manager’s experience, were the mid-career employees. “People with smaller kids, that’s where it’s tricky.”
Bosses recognize that many of their employees — particularly ones with families — rebuilt their lives around the expectation that they would be able to continue working remotely. Those who bought houses far outside the city are now looking at long daily commutes. Those who got used to being able to schedule their work around their kids’ school days and sports practices are now having to think about finding expensive child care. In prior years, they might have been able to keep telecommuting on the down-low, hoping that management wasn’t really serious, but the newest mandates have often come accompanied by a draconian message to holdouts: Conform or quit. Akhtar says that while most employers are not trying to inspire mass attrition, à la Musk, they are aware that presenting a return-to-office ultimatum may cause some employees to consider resignation. In certain circumstances, she says, they may desire such self-selecting attrition. “I’ve had employers be honest and say, ‘Yes that is part of it,’” Akhtar told me. Forcing employees to recommit to coming to work at the office on a daily basis, she says, gives management ”an opportunity to see who is onboard.”
To many people who returned to the office voluntarily years ago, such demands can seem insulting. Office workers grew accustomed to thinking that they were adults who could be trusted to choose where they could perform best on any given day. When they feel like management is treating them like children, Akhtar said, they are apt to rebel. Even in typically conformist workplaces like JPMorgan and Amazon, the new mandates have inspired Slack uprisings, murmurs of unionization and disobedience. Employees in some heavy-handed companies have devised sneaky ways to work around the system, for instance by swiping into the office, getting themselves a free coffee, and heading home. (This strategy is so common that management consultants have coined a name for it: “coffee badging.”)
A couple weeks ago, on Reddit, a person posting under the username No-Refrigerator7245, who said they were a New York–based WPP remote worker, asked for feedback about whether they could stay “under the radar” and avoid consequences. (A leaked WPP internal memo advised that noncompliance could result in “disciplinary action up to and including termination.”) The question sparked a vigorous discussion about corporate surveillance in the advertising industry. A commenter who said they worked at another ad company, one of WPP’s competitors, reported there was gossip that the company pinged its employees’ VPNs three times a day to confirm their locations. Another commenter noted what happened last year at Publicis, another competitor, which reportedly fired nearly 100 employees in the U.S. for “egregious” noncompliance with its three-day office policy. “Yep, they’ll fire OP in a heartbeat,” another commenter concluded, referring to the original poster. “At this point the industry is in shambles so better to suck it up and comply than to rock the boat.” The discussion took note of WPP’s disappointing recent financial performance; its stock is down by more than 25 percent since early December.
Last year, at a conference on remote work held at Stanford University, a pair of business-school researchers from the University of Pittsburgh presented a paper that drew a connection between return-to-office mandates and poor financial results, finding that in the case of many companies — UPS, Amazon, Boeing, Nike — policies were toughened immediately after stock-price crashes. The professors hypothesized the outcome was consistent with management deciding to “reassert control over employees,” blaming them as “a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” It makes intuitive sense: Bosses get stressed and they punish their lazy workers.
On the other hand, those bosses might reply, bad financial performance might be a sign that flexible policies are not as productive as workers may think. That was the message that Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, recently sent to the Silicon Valley engineers assigned to work on Gemini, its artificial-intelligence product. “I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” Brin told his employees in a memo that was promptly leaked to the Times. A 60-hour work week, he suggested, was “the sweet spot of productivity.” Brin is probably not wrong to think that, as his search-engine business faces an existential competitive threat from AI start-ups, his coders ought to be working overtime. (Google’s thousands of employees in New York are only required to be in the office three days a week.) A similar catchup effort has been playing out at Rockstar Games. It called its employees back five days a week last year, Bloomberg reported, as it labored to finish the development of Grand Theft Auto VI, which has been hampered by footage leaks and delays.
The fact that these mandates are coming down in the tech industry just shows how much the workplace conversation has shifted. You can’t blame workers for feeling whipsawed. Even Zoom now mandates that employees who live within 50 miles of one its offices come in at least two days a week.
Last December, just before a round of layoffs, Condé Nast chief executive Roger Lynch announced a new four-day office mandate to his remaining employees. Staffers wondered: Working where? Inside Condé’s offices at One World Trade Center, unassigned “hot desks” were already in short supply. Lynch’s memo promised there would soon be “more information on space,” but satisfying explanations never came. In February, as the mandate loomed, the Condé Nast union staged an unusual labor action. Instead of striking, magazine staffers came to work simultaneously, to demonstrate how cramped they would be.
“We wait in line for phone pods,” the union posted on X. “We hold meetings while Avicii blasts over the speakers & people eat sandwiches in the background of our Zooms.” An accompanying photo displayed a group of young workers, laptops open, sitting five to a booth in the cafeteria.
While it did not exactly resemble a coal mine, the scene did foreshadow the unproductive discomfort that Condé’s clumsily implemented policy would inflict when it started in March. “It’s just a shitshow,” says one employee, who described a weeks-long competition for scarce desks. “Everyone is miffed, even the top brass.”
The annoyance of overcrowding has been exacerbated by the unforgiving rigidity of the policy. In briefings given by human resources, managers were told that employees were required to be present Monday through Thursday. It didn’t count if you worked from home because your child had a fever, or you were getting a cough that might be something worse — you would have to take one of your ten allotted remote work days per year, or else call in sick. Working on a Friday also didn’t count toward your four-day requirement, which was maddening to employees who had to work in the office on Fridays, doing things like finishing up a magazine that has to go to the printer. Upper management let it be known that it was tracking badge swipes. A briefing slide titled “Non-Compliance With Policy,” illustrated with a stock photo of a pair of very serious looking models, indicated there were two options for dealing with truants:
• Voluntary Resignation
• Involuntary Separation
To some employees, it all seemed very reminiscent of the chainsaw-wielding tactics of Musk. “Overall, we see the RTO push as a way to coerce members to quit without severance,” says Jess Lane, an organizer of the Condé Nast union protest. “This is another way of culling the herd.”
The space constraints Condé Nast’s employees were feeling were the product of management’s previous cost-saving decisions. As the magazine business contracted, so had its office space inside One World Trade Center. Publications like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair were forced to downsize their space. At one point in 2021, Condé’s ownership stopped paying rent to its landlord in an unsuccessful attempt to spring itself from its decades-long lease in the building. The two sides settled their dispute, but Conde has continued to attempt to unload space on the sublease market. At least five of its floors that it leases are currently listed as available to sublet, according to the CoStar Group’s commercial real-estate data. Lane says that in response to the overcrowding issue, Condé Nast recently moved some workers to the building’s 27th floor, which was one of the spaces it had been trying to sublease.
Many companies took an opportunistic approach to their office space during the pandemic, reducing their square footage when their leases came up for renegotiation or subleasing unused floors. Now, that tide of vacancy is starting to roll back in. According to figures from CBRE, since the beginning of last year, around 3 million square feet has been taken off the sublease market by companies that say they plan to reoccupy it.
Shifting to hybrid or all-remote work policies not only saved on rent, it also allowed companies to quickly expand their workforces, because they were no longer limited by geography when it came to hiring talent. It has turned out, though, that dispersal creates its own limits. Altruist, a financial technology company founded in 2018, used a work-from-home policy to quickly staff up by hiring people all over the country, only to decide as it grew more established that it needed offices for managerial and regulatory reasons. “All we knew is that the longer we waited, the more difficult this would be,” says Katherine Starros, the company’s head of human resources. In 2023, after health concerns related to COVID relaxed, it told its employees they would have to work in an office in Dallas or Los Angeles, and gave them around six months to relocate within commuting distance, if necessary. Starros said 13 percent of its 250 employees quit, a little less than the opt-out rate the company expected. Altruist has since filled all those positions and more. It is expanding its two offices and has opened an outpost in San Francisco. A New York location is also in the works. “We are really excited about our first ever real internship program this summer,” Starros said.
In some cases, corporate decisions made based on the presumption of continuing low office attendance have had expensive consequences. During the pandemic, some New York office tenants decided to make an upgrade in quality, vacating their old buildings when their leases expired and taking smaller but pricier office space in new construction in developments like One Vanderbilt or at Hudson Yards. “Some companies that did that transaction — less space, higher rent — thought they could shimmy down,” says Peter Turchin, a commercial broker at the firm CBRE. “And then they ended up needing more space.” As workers return, companies have had to squeeze in or rent more space. Turchin said that happened to IBM, which in 2022 decided to consolidate its multiple New York office locations in a new building at One Madison Avenue. In January, just a few months after it moved into the completed building, it signed a lease for an additional 93,000 square feet. (An IBM spokesperson said the recent lease decision was “in no way a result of not having enough space for employees currently.”)
Last year, Amazon announced it would soon begin requiring full-time attendance from all of its 350,000 corporate employees. “If it’s not for you, then that’s okay. You can go and find another company if you want to,” an unsympathetic Amazon executive said at an industry conference as the company rolled out the corporate decision. Then the unforgiving policy ran up against the laws of physics. When it took effect nationwide, in January, it turned out there were not enough desks, chairs, and parking spaces to go around, creating chaos and embarrassing headlines for corporate America’s supposed logistics experts. In New York, Amazon has been rushing to find additional office space beyond what it has inside its new hub in the Lord & Taylor building, signing leases in three other buildings in the last few months.
One of those new Amazon leases, completed just this month, is at 237 Park Avenue, where it is reportedly taking over a 193,000 square foot space that was put on the sublease market in 2022. The former occupant of the space was a subsidiary of WPP, which was relocated into the conglomerate’s headquarters at 3 World Trade Center. When WPP opened its World Trade Center campus in 2018, around 4,000 of its employees worked in the building. After WPP’s consolidation, the office now has a headcount of around 6,500 on paper. Although WPP has leased some additional space over the years, a former WPP employee told me the World Trade Center offices were already short on desks, conference rooms, and anyplace to make a private phone call, and had no idea how the company was possibly going to fit in everyone who is supposed to work there now that Read has told them all to come back 4 days a week. The CEO conceded he wasn’t sure himself.
“If everybody follows the rules on day one, we’ll probably have some challenges,” Read told me. Although the current World Trade Center office capacity is considerably smaller than its overall headcount, in reality some percentage of employees will still not use the space. Some are assigned to be embedded with their clients. Some remote workers have been grandfathered in or have been able to negotiate waivers. Still, the office will certainly be more crowded. A WPP spokesman says that the company is not currently looking to sign new leases, but it has directed its individual companies to reassess and if necessary reconfigure their interior spaces. Five years after drawing up its strategic plan, WPP has come to the realization that desks are, in fact, essential to work.
Read anticipates WPP will be stronger once its office returns to normal. “When we get through to the other side, it’s going to be better for our culture,” he says. “Our ideas will be better. And actually, our workforce, our people, will be happier.” Now they all just need a place to sit.
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