UK workers increasingly rejecting return-to-office mandates

New research reveals that less than half of UK workers would comply with a full-time return-to-office mandate, with women and some parents showing the strongest resistance to employer demands for in-person attendance.
Despite high-profile CEO announcements and media reports suggesting a “great return” to workplaces, researchers found no evidence of a mass move back to offices, with working-from-home rates remaining stable since 2022.
The study, by researchers at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London and King’s Business School, analysed over 1 million observations from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and 50,000 responses from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes UK (SWAA), providing a comprehensive picture of remote working patterns across the UK workforce from early 2022 through to the end of 2024.
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