Four reasons RTO mandates backfire, and what Pinterest does instead
Summary: RTO mandates ignore how offices actually get used and often backfire, damaging morale and retention. Pinterest uses flexible hybrid work and occupancy data to design purpose-driven spaces, proving attendance should follow engagement, not force it.
Studies suggest that flexible working policies not only promote wellbeing but also don’t negatively impact performance.
Yet, Target, TikTok, Fidelity Investments and UBS are still plowing ahead with full-time in-office mandates or retracting flexible work policies for specific teams.
Headlines can be misleading, though: 89 per cent of organisations still have a hybrid work programme in place, down only three percentage points from 2024.
Pinterest’s global Workplace Strategy Lead, Brian Huber, recently joined HubStar’s Workplace Visionaries podcast to discuss how his team designs offices that don’t rely on mandatory attendance, and the damage mandates do elsewhere.
Pinterest has run on a fully flexible hybrid model, Pinflex, since 2022, where employees choose whether to work remotely or in-office. It hasn’t slowed the company’s growth, with a new London HQ opened this June.
Here’s why mandating office attendance doesn’t work, what Pinterest does instead, and what HR leaders can take from it.
1. The “full-time” pre-pandemic office never actually existed
“Return to office” implies returning to a “normal” that isn’t accurate.
If this logic held, pre-pandemic office space utilisation rates would be close to 100 per cent. But they were between 65 and 75 per cent, compared to 80 per cent peak utilisation levels today.
Offices never had the capacity to support every employee at once. Forcing that today will result in overcrowding, workarounds like coffee badging and damaged productivity, issues that fall on HR’s desk.
What Pinterest does instead
“Any survey you send about the biggest obstacle to coming into the office, the number one answer is always the commute,” says Brian Huber. “You can’t solve that unless someone’s willing to pay the price in effort, time, and often money. So the goal is: let’s create an office so when they do come in, they’re productive, they like being there.”
Action for HR leaders
Survey your employee base to find out what’s holding them back. Change the objective from maximising attendance to building a workplace people want to be in.
“Return to office” implies returning to a “normal” that isn’t accurate
2. The office’s purpose has changed and varies by location
CEOs often cite “better collaboration” to justify mandates, without evidence of what’s actually been done to facilitate it.
Collaboration with colleagues is the main reason 68 per cent of employees come into the office. This is followed by in-person meetings at 58 per cent.
Adding more meeting rooms isn’t the fix, because there’s still so much nuance in how employees use space.
One consistent pattern across large portfolios is that there aren’t enough meeting rooms and the existing ones are too big.
HubStar’s 2025-2026 Hybrid Occupancy Index found 80 per cent of meetings happen in rooms built for six or fewer, and two person rooms are usually half empty.
Add in portfolio-wise differences like Pinterest’s, there’s even more nuance to unpack. An office that’s mostly engineers and developers will have a very different purpose than a mostly sales office, for example.
A single mandate forces people into spaces that don’t fit their work.
What Pinterest does instead
“We’re now designing offices as revenue-driving spaces – the use case isn’t your team coming in to work at desks, it’s getting clients and customers in, holding events, driving revenue in that space,” states Brian.
Action for HR leaders
Use employee surveys, NPS scores and space-level utilisation data to understand what each office is actually used for. Then advocate for investment based on that evidence.
3. Mandates are issued on assumptions, and HR has to clean up when they fail
One of the best examples of the lack of data to mandate failure pipeline is Bay area employees finding out the office was 800 desks short after the company’s 2023 mandate.
When that happens, HR is who they’ll come to call on first. Not the CEO who issued the mandate or the corporate real estate team that measured capacity.
Pair that with poor visibility into who’s actually coming in, why, and which spaces they’re using, and the result is a mandate built to fail.
What Pinterest does instead
“I use badge data to get a clean picture of who’s coming in, how often, and what teams. And then overlay occupancy sensor data on top to get a picture of how many people are in the space, and understand how the space is actually used. It’s helped drive calculations understanding actual desk requirements, meeting room requirements, and focus room requirements.”
Action for HR leaders
Partner with corporate real estate, workplace and facilities management teams to analyse workplace data before opposing a mandate.
HR, CRE and FM share ownership of workplace experience but haven’t worked together directly until recently. That needs to be overcome so decisions are made on data.
One consistent pattern across large portfolios is that there aren’t enough meeting rooms and the existing ones are too big
4. Mandates damage morale, productivity and retention
More than half (58 per cent) of organisations don’t offer employees a good workplace experience. This is a gap that mandates make more visible.
Plus, 42 per cent of HR leaders saw a decline in employee morale after an RTO mandate, and eight in 10 companies also lost talent as a result.
The data is clear: forced attendance drags down the metrics HR is measured on, leaving HR to prove that the mandate, not something else, caused the damage.
The root cause is that leadership sees mandates as a cost-saving lever against real estate spend without weighing the cost that follows.
What Pinterest does instead
Brian’s team forecasts real demand from occupancy data and designs to that instead of projected headcount.
“If we design spaces to how people want to work, and support that – knowing they’re not always going to be there – you’ve won them,” Brian says. “This helps with retention, helps people better identify with the company, and doing it with this demand concept, you’re still able to lower portfolio and square footage – cost savings too, but it can’t just be about the cost savings. I don’t think any company wants employees who don’t want to be there. Forcing them into the office five days a week into a space they don’t want to be in – do you really think you’re going to get a more productive workforce that way?”
Action for HR leaders
Cost reduction and engagement aren’t mutually exclusive. Make the case that attendance should be an output of engagement, not a prerequisite for it.
For more actionable tips on getting your leadership team aligned on the real purpose of your office, and why mandates won’t help anyone realise that, check out the full podcast episode of Workplace Visionaries with Brian Huber.
Read another article by Jacqueline Towers: Five reasons workplace change fails, according to neuroscience
