TL;DR

RTO mandates are almost always defended by intent, citing things like better collaboration, stronger culture, and protecting investment in office space. Almost none are tested against a harder question: who does this actually exclude, and what does that cost. Veronica Bruner argues that the real price of a return-to-office policy isn't measured in square footage or attendance, but in the talent, equity, and labor economics that leaders rarely price in.

A return-to-office mandate is never announced without giving a reason. Collaboration will improve. Culture will strengthen. The office, possibly empty for years, will finally justify its lease. The rationale changes by company, but the pattern underneath it rarely does: a decision is made, then defended, and the question of who it actually affects is asked, if at all, after the policy is already signed.

Veronica Bruner, Staff HRBP at Lucid Motors, has spent nearly a decade in HR roles across companies that lived through all three eras of this argument: full-time office work, the abrupt shift to fully remote during the pandemic, and the return to some version of in-person work. That vantage point has left her skeptical of how the decision itself is framed. "Some of it is legacy thinking and sunk cost from long-term office leases," she says. "And some of it is based on outdated assumptions about how optimal productivity works."

The sunk cost is easy to see. Corporate real estate does not become cheaper because it sat empty. But Veronica is more interested in the assumption that visibility equals output, that a mandate can be justified by intent alone. "I think there's an aspect of control that comes with being able to see who is in the office, when and where and how much," she says. Intent, in other words, is doing a lot of work that evidence should be doing instead.

Intent isn't the right test for a policy like this. What matters is whether the mandate has been checked against who it actually leaves behind.

The Cost Nobody Prices In

The financial argument for returning to the office usually stops at the lease. Veronica's argument starts there and keeps going. "If you expect people to commute, sacrifice time, arrange extra caregiving, you have to pay them more," she says. "So full-time in-office mandates raise the cost of labor, especially for people who are already stretched thin."

The claim is about who absorbs the cost of a policy that looks free on a balance sheet: the lease is a fixed cost already sunk, while commute time, caregiving logistics, and the wage premium needed to offset both are variable costs transferred onto employees, scaling with how far someone has to stretch to comply.

That transfer is not distributed evenly. Veronica points to primary caregivers, and the invisible labor that a return-to-office policy makes newly visible. "A return to office disproportionately increases that burden, especially on women," she says, citing data that more than 60 percent of women name flexibility as a top reason for staying in or choosing a job. When that flexibility disappears, the consequence is burnout, and a narrowing of who can afford to stay, and by extension, who gets to advance.

When a policy raises the cost of participation, the people who can least absorb that cost are the ones most likely to leave first.

Where Talent Actually Lives

A return-to-office mandate assumes a kind of geographic flexibility that most people don't have. It isn't only that commuting costs money or time. It's that office locations and affordable housing rarely sit in the same place, and a mandate treats that mismatch as if it doesn't exist. Veronica says, "If your child is in daycare in the East Bay and you are working in San Francisco, there are obviously sacrifices that are made."

A company she worked at previously opened a new state for payroll purposes so an employee could move to Kentucky. "She was moving to Kentucky because, where she was living, the cost of childcare for three children under three almost negated her paycheck," Veronica says. "People chose to move during the pandemic so that they would have support, so that they could do their jobs. When we ask people to move back to large metropolitan areas, which have a much higher cost of living and a much higher cost of labor, we neglect to acknowledge the family support, the community support that a lot of people moved to cultivate."

The employee had strong performance reviews and, by Veronica's account, lived the company's values more visibly than most. Under a strict in-office mandate, none of that would have mattered. She would have had to choose between the job and being able to afford childcare for three children, and the company would have lost her, not to a competitor, but to arithmetic. The flexibility wasn't a perk, but rather the condition that kept a strong performer on the team.

"When we eliminate opportunities for people who have lives outside of work, we narrow our talent pool and we narrow our ability to bring in diverse perspectives, and that actually impacts our bottom line," Veronica says. That impact is rarely visible right away. A less diverse team is more likely to miss how a product or policy fails people unlike themselves, and that failure surfaces later, in the market or in the workforce.

Culture Is Not a Byproduct of Proximity

If a mandate can't be justified by cost or geography, the argument usually falls back to culture, which is harder to measure. Shared space, the reasoning goes, produces shared identity almost automatically. Veronica rejects that premise. "Culture is what we intentionally design and continually reinforce," she says. "Culture doesn't automatically emerge just because people share a space."

A team that sits in the same room every day can fail to build culture, and a fully distributed team can succeed at it, if the second team does the work the first one assumed it didn't need to do. Veronica points to specific mechanisms that remote teams she’s worked with used: "We introduced asynchronous check-ins, really transparent documentation, and flexible meeting norms." These are ordinary practices, deliberate substitutes for the informal cues an office provides for free, built when a team can't rely on proximity as a shortcut.

"It dramatically improved psychological safety and inclusion, especially for underrepresented groups," Veronica says, pointing to primary caregivers and neurodivergent employees as two groups that benefited directly from norms designed around flexibility rather than presence. She speaks from inside that group herself: "As someone who is neurodivergent, I can tell you that it's possible for me to go into an office every single day, but it does cost something." That cost doesn't show up on an attendance sheet. It shows up later, in attrition, disengagement, or a narrowing candidate pool.

People stay in cultures that work for them, and remote teams kept people other companies were losing. WIRED found that remote work improves access for diverse talent, and a Stanford study measured a 13 percent increase in productivity and nearly a 50 percent reduction in attrition among remote workers. "The culture got stronger," Veronica says, "not because of proximity or proximity bias, but because we learned better tools and we learned better skills to communicate."

Being present in an office still matters for some roles. What the evidence doesn't support is requiring it for everyone, all the time, by default.

The Reasonable Case for Being in a Room

However, the desire for in-person work is not unreasonable or illegitimate by default. "I think there are genuine reasons why people need to be in the office," Veronica says. Some work benefits from proximity. Some relationships form faster in a room than over a screen. Wanting people together is a real instinct. Designing a policy around why is a separate task, which is often skipped.

There's a real downside to going fully remote too, and Veronica doesn't dismiss it. Early-career employees who never spend time in an office miss out on things that used to be absorbed by osmosis, like reading a room, understanding office norms, or learning what counts as appropriate in a professional setting. "There's a lot of discussion about early-career employees and how their exposure to an office environment and to office norms is important, and how people are missing out," she says. She's fielded questions post-pandemic she never had to field before, like an employee genuinely unsure what to wear to work. She compares it to children who missed two formative years of preschool during Covid and are now showing measurable effects in kindergarten, and expects something similar with new graduates who've never had to learn an office's unwritten rules.

She doesn't take that as an argument for reversing course. Treating "how people learn to work together" as something a company designs for closes that gap. It’s the same discipline she applies to remote culture, just aimed at a different problem.

Veronica ties the whole question back to values. "Company values are a way to help people make the right decision in a difficult situation," she says. Companies already use values this way in hiring, when choosing between two similarly qualified candidates, and in performance reviews, when judging who actually lives up to what the company claims to stand for. A return-to-office policy is no different. It's another decision that is supposed to be guided by values, not made separately from them.

"A strong return to office policy would weave flexibility, equity, fairness and transparency into your total rewards policy," she says. If a company believes every employee should be able to afford health care, that belief is built into a total rewards program. The same logic applies to where and when people are expected to show up.

In practice, Veronica points to tiered hybrid models as what a values-aligned policy actually looks like: roles that require deep collaboration get more scheduled in-person time, while more independent roles stay remote, and outcomes get tracked for both, adjusted by role as evidence comes in rather than fixed in advance for everyone.

"I think a hybrid environment is totally reasonable," Veronica says. "I think you can make a culture that is flexible enough for everyone to be successful. But you have to do it on purpose."

A hybrid policy and a full-time mandate can both be defensible, if someone has actually tested them against who they include and who they leave out. Neither earns that defense automatically.

The Question That Actually Tests a Mandate

HR leaders rarely decide whether a mandate goes into effect, but they're almost always the ones managing the fallout. "I'm not making the actual decision," Veronica says. "I'm influencing decision makers by giving them options." Responsibility for the outcome and authority over the decision sit in different places. Most of the pressure in the role comes from that gap.

Closing it, in Veronica's view, starts with a shift in posture. "HR needs to be thinking proactively," she says. "They need to be future facing and courageous enough to challenge reactive decision-making." That means resisting the pull toward the easiest available question, where should people work, in favor of a harder one: "What is the actual problem we are trying to solve?" she asks. "More often than not, it's not where people are working. It's about communication. It's about transparency. It's about documentation. It's about accountability."

Asked what single question she'd leave HR leaders with before any mandate is finalized, Veronica says, "Who gets left behind if we mandate this? And what does it cost us? Not just financially, but also culturally if they leave? That question forces us to confront the impact, not just the intent of bringing people back into the office."

The impact on employees with disabilities, primary caregivers, and people for whom geography makes compliance impossible is rarely visible at the moment a policy is signed. It shows up later, in who has already left and, further back, in who was never considered to begin with. “The workplace that you design signals your values whether they're intended or not,” Veronica says. A leader's values show up in the impact of a decision. That's why asking who pays for it before making the call matters more than what the decision was meant to accomplish.

Before the Policy Takes Effect

Return-to-office mandates will keep being justified by referring to collaboration, culture, and an existing office lease. They don't answer the question that actually determines what a mandate costs.

That question weighs who gets to keep sitting anywhere at all, once the caregiving math stops working or the commute out-prices the wage. A mandate can be well-intentioned and still fail this test.

The actual problem is an unexamined default. The leaders who still have to make this call have a choice: find out who gets left behind before the policy takes effect, or find out after.

Practical Takeaways: Testing an RTO Mandate by Who It Excludes

Most RTO mandates are justified by what they are meant to fix, such as weak collaboration, a fading culture, or an underused lease. Few are tested against who they actually exclude and what that costs. That is the test HR leaders need to apply to the decisions in front of them: which employees carry the exposure, what a mandate actually costs, and what a values-aligned alternative looks like in practice.

1. What is the one question HR leaders should force before finalizing any RTO decision? One question should be forced before any RTO mandate is finalized, according to Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors): who gets left behind if we mandate this, and what it costs us financially and culturally if they leave? She frames this as the question that shifts the conversation from intent to impact, since a policy can be well-meant and still fail whoever cannot comply. For leaders, the decision rule is direct: if the answer to who gets excluded has not been calculated, the mandate has not actually been tested.

2. Why does culture fail to form just because people share office space? Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors) rejects the assumption that shared physical space produces shared identity automatically. She argues that culture is what a team intentionally designs and continually reinforces, not a byproduct of proximity. Veronica points to her own experience with remote teams that built asynchronous check-ins, transparent documentation, and flexible meeting norms to replace the informal cues an office provides naturally. An in-office team that skips this design work can still fail to build culture, while a remote team that does the work can succeed at it.

3. What is the earliest sign that an RTO mandate is being driven by nostalgia rather than a clear business case? The clearest signal, according to Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors), is a company that cannot articulate why physical presence is essential for its work when it was not essential during the pandemic's remote years. When a mandate leans on collaboration or culture language alone, Veronica points to legacy thinking and sunk office-lease costs as the actual driver, not a new case for why in-person work improves performance. If leaders cannot name why presence matters now, the decision is more likely nostalgia dressed as strategy than a tested business case.

4. Which employee groups carry the most exposure when a company mandates full-time in-office work? Primary caregivers, employees with disabilities, neurodivergent employees, women, and geographically dispersed talent are most exposed to a full-time RTO mandate, according to Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors). She points to data showing more than 60 percent of women cite flexibility as a top reason for staying in or choosing a job, and describes her own experience as a neurodivergent employee for whom office attendance carries a real, uncounted cost. Veronica ties this to a consequence: narrowing who can stay narrows the talent pool and the range of perspectives a company can draw on, affecting the bottom line.

5. What is the real cost of treating full-time RTO as a default rather than a deliberate decision? Leaders underprice RTO, according to Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors), because they count the office lease and stop there. The costs of commuting, extra caregiving, and lost time land on employees first, and a company can only ask them to absorb that for so long before it surfaces as a wage premium or higher turnover. Because the lease is a fixed cost already sunk while these employee-side costs are variable, a default RTO policy is more expensive to sustain than it looks on a balance sheet. 

6. What does a return-to-office policy signal to employees about company values, independent of leadership's intent? Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors) argues that workplace design communicates a company's values regardless of what leadership intended it to say. An RTO mandate that ignores caregiving logistics, disability access, or geographic affordability signals those priorities come second to visibility and control, even if no one states it that way. Because employees read impact rather than intent, a values statement promising flexibility or equity can be undercut by a policy that never tests itself against who it excludes. 

7. What operating changes enable a hybrid or remote team to build strong culture without relying on physical proximity? Distributed teams can build culture without relying on shared space through a specific set of practices Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors) points to: asynchronous check-ins, transparent documentation, and flexible meeting norms. She says that these changes can measurably improve psychological safety and inclusion, particularly for underrepresented groups. Leaders need to treat these practices as deliberate infrastructure rather than substitutes to tolerate until everyone returns to an office. Building this infrastructure means gaining a team that functions on its own terms, instead of one that depends on proximity to hold together.

8. What does a values-aligned alternative to a blanket RTO mandate actually look like in practice? A tiered hybrid model is the practical alternative to a blanket mandate. Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors) argues that roles that need deep collaboration get more scheduled in-person time, more independent roles stay remote, and outcomes are tracked and adjusted by role as evidence comes in. She ties this to total rewards policy, arguing that flexibility, equity, fairness, and transparency should be built into compensation and workplace design the same way healthcare or retirement benefits are. The distinction from a blanket mandate is that the policy is tested against roles and evidence rather than applied uniformly by default.

9. What should HR leaders actually measure to know if an RTO mandate is costing them talent? Attrition and productivity are the numbers that expose whether an RTO mandate is costing an organization talent, according to Veronica Bruner (Staff HRBP, Lucid Motors). She cites a Stanford study that measured a 13 percent increase in productivity and a nearly 50 percent reduction in attrition among remote workers, alongside data from McKinsey showing more than 60 percent of women name flexibility as a top reason for staying in a job. For HR leaders, the scoreboard is not attendance. It is whether attrition concentrates among caregivers, women, and dispersed talent.

Closing Reflection

Intent tells leaders what a policy was meant to accomplish, and impact tells them what it actually did. HR leaders rarely hold final authority over an RTO decision, but they are the ones left managing who it excludes and what that costs. Asking the exclusion question before the mandate is signed is the only point where that cost can still be priced in, rather than discovered after an employee has already left.

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To hear how the full conversation played out, listen to Veronica's podcast episode.

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