The return to office is complete – but what’s the real driver?

That tension is visible in the data. Robert Half found that 63 per cent of Canadian workers say work-life balance and remote work options would motivate them to change jobs. Among the 44 per cent in the Robert Half study who say they are already planning to look for a new role in the second half of 2026, a significant share cited a desire for more flexibility as a primary reason, raising the spectre of retention issues in the wake of RTO mandates.

“Having the opportunity to work from home and being able to work successfully from home for a number of years showed us that work-life balance is a great thing,” says Zweig. “It doesn’t mean we want to exclusively work from home anymore, but having that flexibility certainly allows us to obtain a little better work-life balance.”

However, in the current labour market, organizations should focus less on retention concerns and more on morale, he says. “When you have a tight job market where organizations aren’t necessarily hiring like they were during the pandemic, it’s going to be much stickier for [workers] to consider leaving for other opportunities,” he says. “So HR people really need to focus on how can we deal with the fact that people have this autonomy and flexibility, made it work, enjoyed the work-life balance, and now that’s been taken away from them.”

Hybrid may become a talent advantage

If the majority of Canadian employers are racing to full-time on-site requirements, the minority who retain some flexibility may find themselves with an unexpected competitive edge — but only if they understand what that flexibility is actually doing for them, says Zweig.

“It could be a very good recruitment tool for some organizations that are willing to understand that presence does not necessarily equal performance,” he says. Extending even partial autonomy over scheduling, he argues, can generate meaningfully stronger commitment and engagement than blanket mandates allow. “If they’re not going to have a strict RTO policy that has some flexibility for people that allows them to at least have some autonomy over their schedule, I think that could be a real driver of commitment and engagement – to give people a little bit of that autonomy back that they may no longer have.”