By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

It turns out the return-to-office movement isn’t just about productivity, collaboration, or company culture. For a significant number of companies, it’s about leases—those binding, long-term commitments to office spaces that are now sitting underused while hybrid work proves its staying power. A recent Resume.org survey of 900 business leaders peels back the polished justifications for RTO and reveals the financial tether that’s quietly shaping policy: the office lease.

Real Estate, Not Culture, Is Behind Many RTO Decisions

The corporate narrative surrounding return-to-office has largely centered on soft justifications—enhanced communication, team cohesion, and managerial convenience. Yet 40% of business leaders in the Resume.org survey admitted that making better use of paid-for office space is a core reason they’re mandating in-person attendance. That number climbs when lease agreements are considered directly. Among companies that lease office space, more than half acknowledged that those agreements are affecting their RTO policy decisions, with 16% citing them as a major influence.

These are not minor edge cases. Two-thirds of surveyed companies still lease office space, and nearly half of these leases won’t expire until 2028 or later. Many of these contracts were signed well before the seismic shift brought on by the pandemic. A full 43% of leases were inked before 2020, locking companies into traditional space commitments that no longer match operational realities.

By 2025, nearly three-quarters of these companies will require employees to be in the office at least three days a week, and almost one in three will mandate a full five-day schedule. Only 2% will permit once-a-week or less. In other words, many companies are keeping offices full not because they must, but because they’re already paying for them.

Similarly, the corporate real estate management giant JLL observes that after years of trimming space, 57% of corporate real-estate leaders now feel confident enough in hybrid patterns to start “rightsizing” portfolios. In the short term, however, many are locked into pre-pandemic leases that compel continued in-office attendance while they redesign or sublet surplus areas. JLL expects average mandated presence to settle near four days weekly until those contracts unwind, after which flexible layouts and shorter terms will dominate.

Quiet Calculations, Loud Mandates

Publicly, leaders tout culture, collaboration, and innovation as RTO drivers. Privately, they’re looking at balance sheets. The acknowledgment that real estate contracts are shaping policy represents a critical moment in the evolution of work. The lease has become a tail wagging the dog of corporate flexibility.

Companies are balancing optics against reality. Only 32% of leaders expressed real concern about employees quitting over RTO mandates, while nearly half aren’t worried at all. This confidence suggests a strategic calculus: endure short-term pushback while maximizing existing investments, then pivot when those investments expire.

That pivot is already on the horizon. One in ten companies surveyed said they will lessen or completely eliminate RTO requirements once their current leases expire. And 23% plan to downsize their office footprint altogether. Among these companies, 32% will reduce the number of required in-office days, and 8% will drop RTO mandates entirely. The end of a lease, it seems, is a convenient time to align policy with employee preference—and operational efficiency.

A Temporary RTO Masking a Permanent Shift

The writing is on the wall. As leases lapse, companies are finally preparing to walk the talk on workplace flexibility. Matt Morgan, a seasoned California real estate professional quoted in the Resume.org survey, has observed this firsthand. He describes clients transitioning to shorter lease terms or flexible space options, with some reducing office space by 30% and reallocating funds toward tech infrastructure to support hybrid and remote models.

This evolution isn’t just anecdotal. It’s becoming embedded in strategic planning. According to another source quoted in the survey, Kwame Darko, a real estate investor focused on commercial properties, companies are reconsidering the purpose of office space itself. He sees three key forces at play: cost optimization, employee preferences, and evolving operational models. Together, they’re redefining what the office is—and what it’s not.

According to Jeff Dewing, CEO of Cloudfm, mandating an office return primarily serves to gratify executive egos and rationalize sunk costs in underutilized corporate real estate. He critiques the move as a validation of prior expenditures rather than a forward-looking strategy. Dewing practiced what he preached by divesting his own company of six out of eight offices post-lockdown, transforming the remaining two into “collaboration hubs” designed for occasional use by a predominantly remote and hybrid workforce.

Organizations are adopting new approaches like hot-desking, rotating team schedules, and purpose-built teamwork hubs. These are not gestures of generosity toward remote work; they are responses to unavoidable economic logic. Long leases are expensive artifacts of a different era. When those contracts end, so too will many companies’ commitments to keeping butts in seats just to fill square footage.

The Inevitable Reckoning with Office Reality

There’s a certain irony in how the return-to-office debate is unfolding. While companies publicly emphasize the intangible benefits of shared physical space, privately, their decisions are being shaped by the cold, tangible reality of commercial real estate. This duality is starting to crack, exposing a deeper truth: RTO, in many cases, is a short-term necessity born from long-term commitments that no longer make sense.

And once those leases are up? A transformation is coming—not just in policy, but in how companies define the workplace altogether. Offices won’t disappear, but their function and footprint will look markedly different. The remote and hybrid era isn’t just a blip. It’s a business decision that makes strategic sense, especially when weighed against the cost of empty square footage.

For organizational leaders, this is a call to action. The end of the lease is more than a contractual milestone—it’s a strategic inflection point. Forward-looking companies will use it to right-size their real estate, recalibrate their workplace expectations, and align their operations with the realities of modern work. For everyone else, the quiet part will keep getting louder until the cost of pretending it’s not about the lease is too high to ignore.

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By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

A troubling phenomenon is spreading through corporate America, creating friction where artificial intelligence promised efficiency. Researchers at BetterUp and Stanford’s Social Media Lab coined the term “workslop” to describe AI-generated content that appears polished but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance any task. This represents more than a minor irritation. The research estimates that workers waste nearly two hours correcting or redoing each instance of workslop they receive, creating a financial burden that amounts to roughly $9 million annually for a company of 10,000 employees.

The damage extends beyond lost productivity. The research reveals that over half of workers who receive workslop report diminished confidence in their colleagues’ capabilities and reliability. This creates what researchers describe as a “sinking feeling of suspicion” that degrades collaboration across teams. When 54 percent view AI-using colleagues as less creative, 42 percent as less trustworthy, and 37 percent as less intelligent, the interpersonal costs may ultimately exceed the financial ones.

The instinctive response targets either the technology itself or employee laziness, but this view misses the mark entirely. Workslop proliferates in environments where employees view AI as a mysterious “black box,” a powerful tool they feel pressured to use but do not truly understand. This pressure frequently stems from pervasive automation anxiety. Recent surveys show that 89 percent of workers express concern about AI’s impact on their job security, with 65 percent anxious that AI might replace their specific role. When workers see headlines about AI-driven layoffs and fear obsolescence, they engage in what becomes performative adoption.

This creates a toxic cycle. Individuals use AI to generate content quickly just to prove they are using it, regardless of underlying quality. The goal shifts from solving a business problem to simply checking the “used AI” box. One project manager explained the predicament: “Receiving this poor quality work created a huge time waste and inconvenience for me. Since it was provided by my supervisor, I felt uncomfortable confronting her about its poor quality and requesting she redo it. So instead, I had to take on effort to do something that should have been her responsibility.”

The result follows a predictable pattern. The sender saves a few minutes of effort while the receiver inherits hours of work trying to decipher, edit, or simply redo the task from scratch. Artificial intelligence makes this productivity-draining behavior scalable, enabling the rapid creation of useless content with minimal effort.

Forward-thinking organizations combat this trend by fostering an AI culture of agency and co-creation. The foundational principle proves simple but profound: people support what they create. Instead of treating employees as passive consumers of AI-generated content, this approach transforms them into active builders of their own AI solutions. By leveraging accessible no-code and low-code platforms, non-technical employees from departments like marketing, HR, or operations can design and construct AI assistants tailored to their specific, real-world workflows.

When an employee builds a tool, they must think critically about the entire process. They define a successful outcome, structure the necessary inputs, and iteratively refine prompts to ensure quality and relevance. The AI transforms from a mysterious black box into a transparent partner in solving a well-understood problem. This hands-on experience not only demystifies the technology but also instills a deep sense of ownership over the quality of output. Low-code platforms empower workers to build confidence while learning AI’s inherent limitations, which paradoxically increases their comfort and makes them more discerning critical thinkers.

This capability-building model has proven effective in practice. Consider the example of a mid-sized law firm where paralegals began using public AI tools for first drafts of legal documents. The results often contained boilerplate language that missed crucial jurisdictional nuances, creating significant friction and wasting senior attorneys’ billable hours. After shifting to a co-creation model, a team of paralegals and junior associates built their own “Contract Review Assistant,” training it on a curated library of the firm’s most successful briefs and contracts. The AI-assisted drafts became highly aligned with the firm’s standards from the start, reducing senior review time by 55 percent and recovering over 3,200 billable hours annually.

In another instance, a manufacturing company’s quality control team initially used a generic data analysis tool that produced reports too high-level to be actionable. The team then participated in a workshop where they built their own “Defect Tracking Bot,” designing it to cross-reference sensor data with maintenance logs. Because they designed the logic themselves, the bot produced specific, actionable insights, contributing to $1.2 million in savings from productivity gains and defect reduction in its first year.

Eradicating workslop requires a deliberate strategic shift from leadership. This begins by prioritizing strategy over tools, conducting readiness assessments to understand cultural and technical gaps before deploying any platform. Leaders should cultivate agency rather than dependency by framing AI as a set of building blocks and investing in training non-technical teams to create their own solutions.

Organizations must establish clear quality standards by facilitating team conversations about what constitutes high-quality, AI-assisted work and creating communities of practice where employees share best practices. Finally, measuring outcomes rather than just activity becomes crucial. Incentives should reward substantive results like tools that solve real problems, improve team collaboration, or enhance deliverable quality, not vanity metrics like the number of AI prompts generated.

Workslop signals a shallow and ultimately ineffective AI implementation. The path forward lies not in finding a better AI model but in adopting a more thoughtful leadership approach that empowers people, fosters a culture of creation, and builds genuine, human-centric AI capability. This represents the only sustainable path to turning technological potential into a true, defensible competitive advantage.

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