It’s 2025, and bosses are still trying to figure out the best RTO policy. Despite employee backlash, business leaders are calling on their workforce to head back into the office, whether it be for productivity, cost management, or seemingly no reason at all.
Some companies, like BNY, are utilizing data to guide their decision-making. It originally implemented a three-day in-office policy, but after conducting research on worker productivity, it decided to increase to four days in-person.
“We’re complementing [return-to-office] with other benefits, such as two weeks of ‘work from anywhere’ time,” Alejandro Perez, chief administrative officer at BNY, shared at Fortune’s 2025 COO summit. The company also designates two weeks at the end of the calendar year as a “recharge period,” where managers and employees alike are asked to solely focus on critical business and avoid meetings. “People get a little more time to recharge, to spend time at home and get ready for the next year,” he said.
Anne Raimondi, chief operating officer and head of business at Asana, shared the importance of data in guiding the tech company’s in-office policy. While Asana is used as a platform to guide workplaces with asynchronous work models, the company prefers to utilize a “office-centric hybrid” model. “Especially given our demographic of early-career engineers and early-career salespeople, that in-person collaboration is the best way for people to learn and build cross-functional relationships,” she said.
Employees across the globe all go into the office on the same three days a week: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. But Asana also has “no-meeting Wednesdays,” in an effort to incorporate more flexibility into workers’ schedules. And even with in-office requirements, there are still important steps leaders can take to create flexible options for workers, Raimondi argued. One is allowing workers to manage their own calendars, especially as more members of the workforce are becoming part of the “sandwich generation” and are tasked with taking care of both young children and aging parents.
“Even though we are office-centric, we also want to treat employees like the adults that they are.”