Mandate First, Math Later
Why return to office mandates keep failing, and the order of operations that fixes them
By Rashid Masood Rizvi, Founder, AM Masons Advisory
Six years after offices emptied, return to office is still front-page news. Unions are filing grievances. Mayoral candidates are campaigning on it. Employees are comparing notes on which floor still has a free desk by 9:30.
That alone should tell us something. If RTO were working, we would have stopped talking about it two years ago. The fact that it is still a story means most organizations treated it as a policy decision when it was always an operating decision.
Mandate first. Math later.
Here is how it usually goes. Leadership decides the company needs more time together. The CEO or HR drafts the memo. A date gets set. The announcement goes out to everyone at once, including the people responsible for the buildings, who are often reading it for the first time alongside everyone else.
Mandate first. Math later.
The results are now public. When Ottawa moved federal public servants to four days a week in July, some departments had to stagger the return because they did not have the room. The Immigration and Refugee Board went looking for more leased space to comply with its own mandate. In Toronto, bank employees found themselves hunting for desks, sometimes on other floors or in other buildings, away from their teams, while leadership told staff they were searching for more space. And at least one major Canadian bank has quietly let some teams settle at one day a week, while managers carry the four-day expectation. Nobody announced that part.
None of this means the mandates were wrong. Many organizations have good reasons to want people together. It means the order of operations was wrong.
Space assessment is not a seat count
The first mistake is treating space assessment as a seat count. Headcount divided by desks tells you almost nothing. The real question is how the company will actually operate when people come back. Which teams need to be together, and on which days? How much of the work is collaboration, how much is focus, how much is client-facing? Where does Tuesday to Thursday pile up while Monday and Friday sit empty? Do you have enough meeting rooms for the hybrid calls people will take from the office anyway? A floor can have enough desks and still fail, because the rooms are booked solid, the quiet space is gone, and the team that needed to sit together is scattered across three floors.
That assessment has to happen before the date is set. It decides whether the mandate is realistic, which teams it should apply to first, and whether the building needs to change before anyone walks in.
A rule is not a reason
The second mistake is skipping change management. A mandate gives people a rule. It does not give them a reason. People will commute for something they cannot get at home: their team, their manager, decisions being made in the room, the kind of conversation that does not happen on a screen. If they arrive to a half-empty floor, a manager who is not there, and a day of video calls with headphones on, they have learned that the commute was pointless. That lesson spreads faster than any memo.
Managers carry this or it fails. They are the ones who decide whether in-office days are planned around real work or left to chance. Most were never asked, trained or given the tools. They were handed the policy along with everyone else.
The cost of the walk-back
The cost of getting this wrong is not just inefficiency. It is credibility. When people show up to a mandate and find no desk, the mandate loses authority on day one. Leadership then faces a choice between leasing more space in a hurry, in a market where good buildings are getting harder to find, or walking the policy back quietly, team by team. Either way, the organization pays more than it would have if it had done the work first. And the next time leadership asks for something, people remember.
Get the order right
The better sequence is not complicated. Assess how the business will actually operate. Design the space and the schedule around that. Bring managers in early and give them a reason to sell, not just a rule to enforce. Communicate why before you communicate when. Then announce.
The mandate is the last step, not the first. Organizations that get the order right rarely make the news. That is the point.