Canadian employers are winning the return-to-office battle.
They’re losing something more important.
I just finished reading Maclean’s March 2026 “Office Wars” and it highlights such a critical element in our current conversation about workplace mental health, leadership, and sustainability. Major banks, government departments, and large employers mandating four and five days in-person. The hybrid era, for many workers, is over.
And the result? Low morale. Resentment. Offices that weren’t ready for the people who showed up. Relationships between staff and management that are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, breaking down.
This is being framed as a debate about productivity. It isn’t.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of research and coaching leaders across industries: when an organization cannot trust its people to work well unless they can be physically observed, that is a leadership problem. Not a location problem.
Maclean’s cites experts who argue these mandates are less about output and more about control. I’d go one step further. Control is what leaders reach for when they don’t have clarity about what good work actually looks like, how it gets measured, and who is accountable for what. Proximity becomes a proxy for all three.
The gaps showing up in these “Office Wars” were there before the pandemic. Remote work revealed them. Return-to-office is papering over them.
Trust. Clarity. Accountability.
Those are the real issues. And they run in both directions. Employees are resentful, checked out, and resistant long before any mandate lands. But it starts with leaders. When leaders haven’t defined what good performance looks like, haven’t built relationships that make honest conversations possible, and haven’t created conditions where accountability feels fair, employees fill that vacuum with cynicism. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a predictable response to unclear leadership.
That’s the argument at the centre of Leading in Stereo: when leaders lack the tools to set expectations clearly and hold people accountable fairly, they default to managing presence instead of performance. It’s easier to count who’s in the building than to have a direct conversation about results.
Mandating the return doesn’t solve any of that. It just moves the problem into the office.
And it adds new ones.
We are asking people to navigate some of the most stressful conditions of modern life. Commutes that are longer and more costly than ever. The accumulated weight of living through overlapping global crises. Real uncertainty about the economy, about safety, about what comes next. People are carrying a lot before they even sit down at their desks.
Then they arrive at the office, find a hot desk if they’re lucky, and spend the day on Teams calls they could have taken from home.
That is not a psychologically safe environment. It is not even a logical one. And when leaders can’t explain why the commute was worth it, because they haven’t defined what in-person work is actually for, the message employees receive is clear: we don’t trust you, and we don’t particularly care what it costs you to prove it.
That has consequences. For morale, yes. But also for mental health, for retention, and for the kind of psychological safety that makes people willing to bring their best to work at all.
What would actually help?
Let’s be honest about something first. There are real benefits to being in the same room. Team cohesion, spontaneous connection, the kind of relationship-building that is genuinely harder to replicate on a screen. That matters. In-person work, done well, supports wellbeing and belonging in ways that remote work can’t fully replace.
But done well is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Showing up to fight for a hot desk and spend eight hours in back-to-back video calls is not team building. It is commuting to do the same work you would have done at home, at greater personal cost. The value of being together is real. It requires intentional design to actually realize it. That means leaders who are deliberate about when in-person time is used, what it’s used for, and how it’s structured to create the connection and collaboration that justifies the commute.
Without that design, a return-to-office mandate is just a policy. And policies don’t build culture. Leaders do.
Leaders who can say, clearly and specifically, what good performance looks like. Who can have a direct conversation when it isn’t happening. Who understand that psychological health is not a perk. It is a condition for sustained performance. None of that depends on where someone sits. And without it, it doesn’t matter where they sit.
The “Office Wars” will keep generating headlines. But the organizations that come out of this well won’t be the ones who won the location argument. They’ll be the ones who used the disruption to finally build the leadership capability that was missing before any of us had heard the word “hybrid.”
That work is harder than issuing a mandate.
It’s also the only thing that actually works.
