The companies going back to five days in the office are making a bet most of them will lose.
Home Depot just made it mandatory. PNC Financial follows in May. These aren't outliers — they're part of a broader wave of executives who looked at hybrid work, decided it wasn't working, and used their authority to end the debate.
That's the wrong diagnosis leading to the wrong prescription.
The Number That Matters
Gartner put a number to it: strict RTO mandates increase voluntary turnover 18% among high performers. Not average performers. Not junior employees who need mentorship and proximity to grow. High performers — the people you can least afford to lose, the people who know where the bodies are buried, the people getting calls from your competitors right now.
That 18% isn't evenly distributed. It concentrates among women, caregivers, and people with disabilities — demographics already underrepresented in tech, that companies spend enormous resources to recruit. A five-day mandate doesn't apply uniformly; it selectively taxes the people for whom commuting carries the highest cost.
Why CEOs Keep Making This Call
The executive instinct behind full RTO is understandable even when it's wrong. Remote work is harder to observe. Collaboration feels different. Junior employees don't have mentors nearby. Senior employees have optimized for disappearing into home offices. When you can't see the work, it's tempting to substitute presence for productivity.
The error is treating presence as a proxy for performance. Companies that measured output — not face time, not meeting attendance, but actual work product — found that hybrid produced results equivalent to or better than office-only. The data is consistent across industries, company sizes, and job types.
Full RTO filters for the workers with the fewest options. The engineers with three competing offers go somewhere else. The ones who stay are the ones who can't leave — which is not the workforce composition you want to optimize for.
The Talent Market Doesn't Care About Your Policy
The IT labor market is not obligated to respect your RTO decision. It has its own supply, demand, and preferences. Right now, the preference of the most skilled technical candidates is hybrid or remote.
When you mandate full RTO, you're not just setting a policy about where people sit. You're restricting your recruiting pool to a geographic radius. You're telling candidates in other metros they don't qualify. You're competing against remote-first companies that have no such constraint.
For enterprise tech roles — architects, AI engineers, systems integrators — that restriction matters. The talent you need most isn't necessarily in your city, and it's definitely not uniformly interested in five days a week at your headquarters.
What the Next 12 Months Look Like
Watch for the pattern: companies that go full RTO lose their most mobile engineers in Q2 and Q3. Those engineers land at remote-tolerant competitors or enter the staffing market. The mandating companies spend Q3 and Q4 trying to backfill at higher cost, wondering why they can't find people.
Executives will describe this as a market problem. It isn't. It's a self-inflicted talent hole that presents as a market problem.
The organizations staying hybrid — not because it's comfortable but because the data supports it — will have a structural recruiting advantage for the next two years. They're playing the long game on talent while others play the short game on control.
One of those strategies scales. The other one just feels better.
VC5 Consulting works with companies navigating talent strategy — including the ones facing the backfill problem on the other side of a policy decision. If you're trying to source technical talent in a competitive market, let's start there.