We went through a full cycle. January 2025: 3-day RTO mandate announced. March 2025: enforcement started. June 2025: quiet rollback. Here is what actually happened.
January. Email from exec saying "we're a stronger team in-person" with the usual productivity language. Everyone on Slack immediately: are we quitting or what. Headcount was 400.
February-March. People started going in. Compliance was maybe 50% in the first weeks. No real enforcement. Then one all-hands where the VP said attendance was "being tracked" and it spiked to 70%.
April. Three senior engineers on my team left. All went to fully remote companies. One had a competing offer in hand already; I think the RTO was the nudge she needed. One said outright: "I'm not driving 90 minutes round trip to sit on Zoom all day."
May. Suddenly it was "teams can determine their own in-office rhythms in collaboration with their managers." That phrasing is code for: we're backing off but we won't say it.
June. The formal policy became 2 days a week with flex. De facto: my team goes in maybe once every two weeks for planning. Nobody says anything.
What drove the reversal, from what I could tell: talent attrition, one critical hire that turned down the offer explicitly citing the in-office requirement, and middle managers who were themselves not complying and didn't want to enforce it.
Execs almost never say "we reversed the policy." They use language like "evolving our approach" or "team-first flexibility." Watch the verbs.
Now in mid-2026 I'm seeing similar cycles play out in companies around us. The pattern is: mandate, partial compliance, senior attrition, quiet rollback. Not always, but often enough to notice.