London offices are offering monogrammed towels and rooftop gardens to tempt staff back into work, says Alex Morgan

Some of the world’s largest companies are pulling the plug on hybrid working, but not without a hitch. In the US, Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate has been put on pause because of a shortage of desks in New York, Houston and Atlanta, raising the question whether corporates reacclimatising to in-person work have sufficiently ‘rightsized’ their space requirements.

While the examples set out by Trump’s federal buyout, JP Morgan, Salesforce and Barclays in the UK indicate a recent sea change in attitudes to RTO, the logistics of fitting everyone into an office floorplate misses the point that this really is the bare minimum in a series of steps needed to bring workers back in full-time. An environment that employees want to be in; that outguns the comfort of the no-commute or the glare of management, will be key in attracting and retaining talent over the longer-term.

Let me explain. According to KPMG’s CEO Outlook survey, 83 per cent of UK CEOs polled expect employees to work in-person five days a week within the next three years. This is a far cry from 2024 figures from JLL, where over half of all employees said they were commuting to the office fewer than........

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