Drawing Hard Lines

Over the years, we’ve seen every imaginable approach to workplace communication management. From “…we’ll let you know what we decided,” to “…let’s give employees the illusion of input with a carefully crafted survey,” to the rare “…let’s genuinely listen and design around employee needs.” Before the pandemic, the norm was simple: senior leaders dictated how and where people worked. Employees were expected to comply.

The pandemic disrupted that model. Fearing turnover, talent shortages, health concerns, and even litigation, many companies staged a more accommodating posture, inviting employee input into workplace policy. But the notion of employees wielding real influence over corporate decisions always ran counter to hierarchical corporate order. The dynamic remained fundamentally top-down.

Now, circumstances, layoffs, AI, politics, and other factors have eroded employee leverage. The conversation around work is shifting back toward historical norms: employers set the terms and employees accept or leave. And with fewer alternatives, many employees have little choice but to acquiesce. As the Wall Street Journal recently framed it in “The Boss Has Had It With All the Office Activists,” companies from Microsoft to JPMorgan are reasserting authority, pushing back against protests on everything from politics to return-to-office mandates. At TenantSee, we’ve always maintained that the fight over “the office” is just one front in a larger battle over the nature of work.

If corporate interests were truly best served by broad employee input on things like political engagement, workplace models, compensation, or any other matter once reserved for executives, wouldn’t the free market have already taken us there? It’s telling that even startups, often heralded as more progressive, increasingly favor in-office work as they scale. Remote policies in younger firms are often driven less by empowerment than by cost control.

Perhaps employees mistook the reactive, crisis-driven behaviors of 2020–2022 as a permanent shift in power. Today, however, the lines are being redrawn. Work is beginning to look less like 2022 and more like 2010. And despite all the hand-wringing about productivity and bad commutes, employers seem to, once again, favor the office.