Jamie Dimon wants everyone back at JPMorgan. Tim Cook is asking Apple employees to come in three days a week. Goldman Sachs called remote work an "aberration." Meanwhile, Spotify declared itself a "work from anywhere" company. Shopify said "office centricity is over." Twitter told employees they can work from home forever.
Everyone is framing this as an HR decision or a productivity debate or a real estate problem. It is none of those things. It is a brand positioning problem.
Think about it. Where you land on the return-to-office spectrum now communicates something fundamental about your company's values, culture, and identity. It is an employer brand signal that is louder than any careers page copy or Glassdoor response.
Goldman saying "get back to the office" is not really about productivity. It is about signaling intensity, hierarchy, and institutional loyalty. It is consistent with their brand as a place where you sacrifice personal comfort for professional excellence. The RTO mandate IS the employer brand, stated plainly.
Spotify saying "work from anywhere" is not really about flexibility. It is about signaling trust, modernity, and creative autonomy. It is consistent with their brand as a technology company that attracts creative technologists who value freedom. The remote policy IS the employer brand.
Neither is wrong, strategically. What would be wrong is incongruence. If Patagonia, a company built on outdoor adventure and work-life integration, demanded butts in seats five days a week, it would feel like a betrayal of brand promise. If McKinsey went fully remote, it would undermine the apprenticeship model that justifies their pricing.
Here is what concerns me. I am watching companies make return-to-office decisions based on executive preference or lease obligations rather than brand strategy. They are not asking: what does our workplace model communicate about who we are? They are asking: what does the CEO want? Or worse: what does our real estate portfolio require?
The companies that will win the talent war in 2021 and 2022 are the ones whose workplace policy is a coherent expression of their brand identity. Not the ones who are most flexible or most rigid, but the ones whose policy makes sense given everything else they claim to be.
If your brand promise is innovation and your workplace policy is surveillance software on laptops, you have a brand coherence problem. If your brand promise is elite performance and your workplace policy is "do whatever you want," you might also have a problem.
My unsolicited advice to every HR leader being pressured by a CEO who misses the corner office: frame this as brand strategy. The CEO might not care about employee satisfaction surveys. But they care about brand. And right now, your workplace policy is your most visible brand expression to the people who matter most: the ones who have to live inside it every day.
My unsolicited advice to every HR leader being pressured by a CEO who misses the corner office: frame this as brand strategy.