January 2025


If 2025 is the year you start requiring employees to return to the office, you aren’t alone. But what exactly can you do to encourage this transition?


What’s the market doing?

The January news cycle is buzzing with articles about companies cracking down on attendance in the office.

Over the last few years many employers have skirted around the issue, often opting for a soft hybrid model that was not strictly enforced. The mood is now shifting, with a slew of high-profile employers including Boots, JP Morgan, BT, PwC, Starling Bank and Asda recently announcing a strict return to office mandate and the Met Police saying they will reduce pay for employees who fail to adhere to the new policy.


A recent survey by the ONS showed that 26% of people work on a hybrid basis, with a huge 41% commuting to their workplace every day. This trend broadly matches Littler’s Annual Employer Survey Report, which showed that there was an 8% year on year increase in our clients whose workforce were working more days in the office than remotely in 2024.

Interestingly, London lags behind global comparators such as New York, Paris and Singapore in how many days people are spending in the office.


The average central London full-time worker spent 2.7 days in the office in June 2024, an increase from 2.2 days in April 2023. However, In New York, the average worker spent 3.1 days in the office, in Singapore, 3.2 days and in Paris, 3.5 days. If you are interested in diving deeper into the research on this, we recommend reading the full Centre for Cities report.


Although the reasons driving this difference is beyond the scope of this article (and the author’s) expertise, anecdotally, it could be argued that many Londoners moved outside the M25 over the last few years, which has meant commuting time and costs have now made regular travel into the City a particular sore point. Therefore, although return to office mandates are not a uniquely British issue, it does seem that imposing them on a largely London-based workforce may prove tricky.


Decide on an approach

The first question you will need to answer is what exactly your return to office mandate looks like, which can be a deceptively simple choice.


For example, is everyone required in on the same day or will you need to dictate office days for space requirements? Similarly, what constitutes office attendance - can employees commute home early during office days and make up the time later? Will this apply equally to all teams and all grades? How strictly will you enforce the policy?


Without a clear and agreed policy to answer these questions, managers with a preference for working from home may have a far looser interpretation of the rules (and less eagerness to enforce them) - this is particularly the case if you company is siloed into teams. Furthermore, informal or unwritten policies are ripe ground for accusations of favouritism, which are often followed by claims of discrimination.


Dos and Don’ts

Once you have settled on what you want, how do you go about achieving it? Here are our top dos and don’ts:

  • Do know what your contract says. Your contractual wording will be the starting point of any conversation with your employee(s). Most contracts of employment will state the place of work is the office, but this is not always the case. If the T&Cs need to be amended, you may require employees’ consent or rely on a variation clause in the contract. Similarly, think about whether the contract has been varied. This could be as simple as an email exchange with a manager confirming work from home arrangements.
  • Don’t blindly enforce a policy. Whilst consistency is important, you will need to engage with employees on an individual basis to understand if they have a valid, legal, reason for not complying with a return to office mandate. Is working from home a reasonable adjustment for their disability? Do they have an agreed flexible working arrangement with the company?
  • Do know how you are going to measure attendance. Will you be reviewing swipe card data? Will you deploy monitoring software? Assuming your method is the collection of data, you will need to be mindful of your data protection obligations. Often this can be as simple as updating your data privacy notice and policy, however, for some more complex software solutions (which gather large amounts of personal data), you may need to do a deeper dive into your compliance requirements and understand the legal basis on which you are processing it.
  • Don’t selectively enforce the mandate. Although there is no general principle of equal treatment in the UK (unlike some European countries for example), treating employees in similar positions differently can often cause legal headaches down the line, especially when it comes to detrimental treatment in discrimination claims. Although you may legitimately have separate rules for different teams or grades, within those groupings there should be a level of consistency in how employees who fail to adhere to the policy will be disciplined. Avoid the temptation to use office attendance as the reason to dismiss poor behaving or performing employees, unless you are willing to apply that disciplinary sanction to equally office shy colleagues.
  • Do consider the broader strategy; how can you make return to office life more attractive for employees? Equally, how will you deal with dissent and ensure compliance? One cautionary tale to consider is that the first time the Met Police took industrial action was in December 2024, over members’ refusal to engage with their three day a week in the office policy. This may be a controversial decision for your organisation and therefore your HR team will need to prepare for organisation resilience in the face of employee backlash.
  • Don’t ignore the issue. Kicking this particular can down the road may not be a good strategy. Several of the upcoming changes in the Employment Rights Bill will give employers a weaker hand when it comes to forcing through changes in the workplace. For example, the day 1 right to unfair dismissal and new rules around ‘fire and rehire’ mean employers will face greater legal risk if taking decisive action once these provisions come into effect.


For many employers, this is a thorny, political issue as return to office mandates can create ER headaches and tension between junior and senior staff.


It’s important to remember that the location where employees perform their services is, at its most basic, a question of contract law. Consequently, for this issue, more than most, understanding your legal position is of key importance.