Alan Healy: When will Irish companies realise the return-to-office battle has been lost

Rural and suburban businesses spent years watching their customers commute away each morning. Remote work has quietly become an unexpected lifeline.

The world shuddered in recent weeks on news of a viral infection outbreak on a cruise ship, causing three deaths.

It brought back memories of six years ago and how the world was flipped on its axis by the covid pandemic. 

A remarkable chapter of the covid story is actually how rapidly the world recovered. The global economy was largely back on track at a remarkably rapid pace. Some of the most affected industries, such as aviation, bounced back quickly once lockdowns were lifted. 

In many ways, the world kept going. However, in the office, the nature of work was changed forever.

Across the world, the billions of people who left their desks in 2020 and set up at their kitchen tables, spare rooms, and backyard pods have yet to return to their offices in any way close to the manner in which they left.

In the years since then, the debate has raged about return-to-office mandates with competing philosophies on the best way to get work done. 2026 brought a fresh wave of announcements, both in Ireland and globally, by companies wanting more faces back at desks. AIB began phasing in a mandatory three-day office return for hybrid staff, with full implementation due this year. In the US, Paramount called thousands of employees back to New York and Los Angeles for five days a week. TikTok followed. NBCUniversal moved to four days. Novo Nordisk went to five. 

After years of careful negotiation between employers and employees over flexible working, the pendulum has swung hard. But the timing is striking, because the evidence base for blanket office mandates has never looked weaker.

Those in favour of office work are not without logic. Collaboration, spontaneous idea-sharing, mentoring junior staff and building a coherent company culture are legitimate concerns and not just nostalgia for the older days. KPMG's most recent CEO Outlook found that 83% of global chief executives expect a full return to in-person work by 2027. Research from Harvard found that younger workers, particularly early in their careers, show a genuine preference for proximity to colleagues. 

Published this week, new research from trade union Fórsa offers one of the most detailed Irish datasets yet on how remote and hybrid working actually performs. For managers who supervise remote-working staff, 86% said workers seldom or never missed deadlines. For fully on-site teams, that figure was 73%. Remote teams also performed as well or better on communication and collaboration measures. Just 6% of remote workers were reported to have difficulty meeting deadlines, compared with 23% of those working on-site.

These results sit alongside a finding that four in ten workers said they would look for another job if remote access was reduced. A further seven in ten hybrid workers said they would consider moving roles specifically to protect their current level of flexibility.

The level of flexibility that remote work offers, and the reduction in twice-daily commutes, are perks of modern work that few are willing to relinquish. The Morgan McKinley Irish Employment Monitor found that stricter return-to-office policies are already pushing senior professionals toward contract roles or regional employers.

The Fórsa findings are consistent with the broader body of evidence. A major meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2025 found no statistically significant productivity difference between hybrid and fully in-office arrangements, once management quality was controlled for. 

The variable that consistently predicts performance is not where people sit. It is how they are managed. Companies implementing blanket mandates are, in many cases, solving for the wrong problem.

For the economy, the Fórsa research also points to something the office debate rarely engages with: hybrid working is reshaping local business activity entirely. 77% of remote workers now spend more money in their local area, with almost half reporting that this is money previously spent near their offices. Rural and suburban businesses spent years watching their customers commute away each morning. Remote work has quietly become an unexpected lifeline. The daily coffee, the lunch, the after-work purchase, these have migrated to Clonmel, Longford and Dungarvan. 

For a country with persistent regional development challenges and an over-concentrated economy, that quiet redistribution matters.

The pandemic upended how we work. The nature of office work changed, and the data suggests it changed for good reasons. The companies that are still trying to reverse it are not just behind the curve, they are burning goodwill and making noise about a battle they've already lost.