Return To Office All About Politics: STANKOVIC

09/11/2025

stankovic.little.logo

It is no coincidence that the city’s recent return-to-office announcement followed closely after the province’s push for a full-time office attendance.

The City is facing serious budget-related challenges which most likely involve asking for bailouts from the province in addressing OC Transpo’s deepening financial crisis, contributing funding for the next LRT phase and returning the ongoing management of Highway 174 to Queen’s Park. It is not a good time for the city to get on the wrong side of Premier Doug Ford.

In her memorandum to Ottawa City Council members last month, Ottawa’s city manager Wendy Stephanson said all city employees should return to the office five days a week starting Jan. 1. According to Stephanson, the full return to the office is the “foundation for collaboration, organizational culture and excellent service delivery … while supporting the overall wellness and success of the organization.” This decision is supported by the city’s senior leadership team which “regularly reviews our hybrid work approach against best practices and comparable public sector employers.”

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe backed up the her claims saying: “it’s about building a great culture in a great workplace … getting the team together.” He added that the city needs to “align with the marketplace as other employers change work arrangements for employees.”

The city’s mandated return to office followed closely to the same order as Ontario workers who now have to be at the workplace full time starting early January 2026. According to Caroline Mulroney, Treasury board president, her department has too been “closely monitoring the evolution of in-workplace standards for public and private sector organizations” and that the full-time return-to-office standard represents “the current workforce landscape in the province.” Ford has also called on the federal government to bring civil servant back to the office full-time.

If senior bureaucrats actually went through the huge mound of literature and media articles like they claim they did, they would find that there really is no standard” or one-size-fits-all best practice when it comes to returning to the office. It is not obvious either what the “current workforce landscape [standard] in the province” is, at least at the municipal level. The only other municipality that has mandated a full-time return to the office besides Ottawa so far is the City of Brampton. In contrast, the City of Hamilton recently approved its policy that staff is only required to work in the office 50 per cent of the time. Incidentally, Gatineau has no current push to return hybrid workers back to the office full-time. And Ontario is the only Canadian province mandating a full-time return to office although Nova Scotia did order non-unions staff to return to the workplace.

So, who are these other companies in the marketplace that the mayor wants the city to align with? The most often cited examples include Canada’s oligopolies consisting of major banks – the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia and Bank of Montreal who required employees to come to the office at least four days a week starting in September 2025 as well as Rogers Communications requiring a full-time return to the office by February 2026. Rogers has also laid off thousands of employees over the last two years with the help of AI chatbots.

Yet in 2024, 84 per cent of Canadian firms offered work locations flexibility with approximately one-half requiring employees to come in at least three days per week. Looking at the opposite side of large financial institutions, Ottawa based Shopify is completely remote. Shopify also became Canada’s most valuable company during Q2 2025 bumping RBC to second place. According a recent survey by Aon, high performing and engaged employees are more likely than other workers to say that flexible work environments make companies stand out.

An article in The Economist reports a study that found that “firms which insisted on returning to the office after the pandemic saw job satisfaction fall and staff turnover rise.” Collaboration also suffered by making organizations more siloed and less dynamic. Research at the Boston Consulting Group concluded that “flexible work policies are a sign of organizational cultures that trust employees, measure impact over input, and recognize that different people need different conditions to do their best work”.

At the City of Ottawa, 85 per cent of its existing employees already work full time in the office. One would hope that the organizational culture that the city manager and mayor want to maintain already exists at the office. So why the focus on getting the remaining minority back? The reason might be that the debate over hybrid vs full-time office return is less about the management buzzwords contained in the city manager’s memo and more about politics.

The mayor along with the Ottawa Board of Trade have been strong advocates of getting federal government workers back to the office full time to support downtown businesses and downtown revitalization, a situation which has become even a higher priority with the anticipated major cutbacks in the number of federal government workers. It would not look good for the mayor if, on the one hand, he is advocating or the return of full-time federal government office employees while, at the same time, allowing flexible work at the city.

Dan Stankovic is an Ottawa consultant and former municipal public servant in economic development and housing.