July 01, 2026

The Mandate Episode: Why Return to Work is a Losing Fight

31 minutes

If you read the headlines, you'd think nearly every major employer marched its workforce back to the office five days a week. The data says otherwise. And so does the human cost when companies push it anyway.

In this episode of The Catalyst, Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward, an anonymous 30-year IT veteran and former Marine, and Softchoice's Lisa Walkden lay out what return-to-office mandates are actually about — and what they cost the leaders who issue them.

Here's what you'll take away:

Why only about a third of US companies actually went back to five days — and what's really driving the ones that did
How a 30-year tech veteran ended up quiet-quitting his job, and what that reveals about the real cost of a mandate
The reframe one Softchoice leader uses with executives weighing RTO — and the data that backs it up
Why the same companies still picking the RTO fight are often the same ones struggling with AI adoption

Featuring: Brian Elliott, founder of the Flex Index and CEO of Work Forward; Lisa Walkden, Senior Manager of Workplace Experience at Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company; and an anonymous IT leader who agreed to share his story on condition we don't name his employer.

#ReturnToOffice #HybridWork #ITLeadership #WorkplaceStrategy #FutureOfWork #FlexIndex #TheCatalyst

Guests

Brian Elliott — Work Forward
Flex Index (Brian's data set) — flexindex.com
Lisa Walkden — Softchoice
Anonymous — 30-year tech veteran and former US Marine

Research & Data Cited

Flex Index quarterly reports — flexindex.com/reports
Stanford Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (Nick Bloom, WFH Research) — wfhresearch.com
Richmond Fed Economic Brief No. 24-16 (May 2024) — "Return-to-Office Orders: A Survey Analysis of Employment Impacts" by Grey Gordon and Sonya Ravindranath Waddell — richmondfed.org
"Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain" — research from the University of Pittsburgh and Baylor's Hankamer School of Business (3M+ workers tracked via LinkedIn data) — hankamer.baylor.edu
CBRE data on workforce-manager geographic distribution (cited by Brian Elliott in interview)