Earlier this year, Gov. Mike Kehoe’s administration sent an internal memo to Missouri state employees requiring their return to office by late March. Across the state and throughout the country, other employers, including AT&T, JPMorgan and Ford, have taken similar steps this year.
With 2025 marking half a decade since the beginning of COVID-19, the pendulum is swinging away from pandemic-era flexibility for many companies.
Prior to the pandemic, only about 15% of employers in Missouri reported that they had some number of employees working remotely. That number rose to about 25% of Missouri employers in 2023.
Officials driving a push back to the office cite enhanced customer service and improved collaboration as justification for the changes. However, the research doesn’t clearly show that in-person work always improves productivity.
Kansas City-based tax services company H&R Block even reversed its 2021 in-office mandate after receiving pushback from employees indicating enjoyment of hybrid workspaces on annual company surveys.
For many fields, the pandemic brought into the mainstream the novel concept of consistent options — and even requirements — to work from home. This shift away from a traditional work week was something many employees were experiencing for the first time.
Daniel Goering, assistant professor of management at Missouri State University, said the tension between employers and employees vying for more control over their work has fueled some of these return-to-office mandates.
“During the pandemic, employees got a taste of a kind of extreme flexibility and autonomy and freedom and how they work,” Goering said. “And employers lost a lot of control. They lost control over oversight.”
Research like Goering’s shows that top-performing employees often most highly value a schedule with more flexibility.
These employees, according to Goering, prioritize positions in which they feel like their independence is taken seriously. A company takes a risk of losing top performers when it instates stricter rules.
“The employees who want control the most, who are also the ones who perform really well, are your top employees,” he said. “They're the ones who are going to have options, and they're going to exercise those options and find jobs elsewhere.”
Michael Montanye, an assistant management professor at North Central College in Illinois, said the culture at some successful companies is based on the so-called “ideal worker norm,” or the potentially toxic expectation that employees will always be committed to their work over any other non-work responsibilities.
“Any organization that considers themselves a high-pressure, high-performance company, a lot of times their organizational culture is built on this ideal work environment,” Montanye said.
When company culture is tied to the ideal worker norm, the expectation to be fully present in office may be seen as integral to keeping up this culture.
This ideal worker is far from representative of all types of workforce participants. Mothers, in particular, greatly benefit from more flexible working hours, something often seen as conflicting with idealized expectations.
According to a study from the McKinsey Global Institute, 58% of women prefer remote work arrangements, compared to 51% of men.
The burden of child care is often enough to disrupt a woman’s ability to sustain her career, said Wendy Doyle, CEO and founder of United WE, a Kansas City-based nonprofit focused on advancing women’s economic leadership.
“Women in Missouri are three times more likely to drop out of the workforce, especially during the pandemic, due to child care challenges,” Doyle said. “So it often puts families in a position to have to choose between work and family.”
Despite growing pushes for in-office work, places that often alleviate some burden of child care for parents — like schools and day cares — have shifted their new normal, too. Shortened hours, additional days off or more virtual workdays all require a parent to modify their schedule to accommodate for the changes.
Maura Mills, management professor at the University of Alabama, said this increases the strain on working mothers trying to meet both office and familial expectations.
“It's hard when workplaces are demanding, like, ‘Hey, let's go back to our pre-pandemic schedule,’” she said. “But all these other support network organizations haven't returned to pre-pandemic and have actually just adopted these changes as their new norm.”
A workplace utopia does not exist, and return-to-office mandates cannot change that. Instead, Mills said, businesses must work with their employees to understand what is most beneficial to them, not what looks best on paper.
“It's hard to say what the ‘ideal workplace’ would look like, because it looks so different for everyone, because different people have different needs,” she said. “So, in that spirit, I think I have to say that a workplace — the ‘ideal’ — would be one that's flexible, adaptive and responsive for everybody across the board.”
This story was first published by Missouri Business Alert, a fellow member of the Kansas City Media Collective.
