This week, PNC Bank implemented a full-time return-to-office, while Fidelity recently announced more than 21,000 employees would be required to report five days a week starting in September.
Among the most complex people challenges facing HR today are the tensions between in-office and hybrid work expectations, alongside the efforts to navigate AI integration. The two factors often involve significant employee pushback and both are uniquely intertwined, says Cisco Chief People Officer Kelly Jones.
Too often, however, organizations are making the “very easy mistake” of treating AI and RTO as separate conversations, Jones says. In reality, they’re “two sides of the same cultural challenge.”
“Both AI and hybrid work are fundamentally changing where the human connection happens and what humans are uniquely responsible for,” Jones says. “If you’re really thoughtful, those two forces can actually reinforce each other, rather than compete with each other.”
A key factor prompting organizations to bring workers back to the office full-time is fear that human connection is being lost, Jones says.
“Leaders feel like culture, collaboration and innovation are eroding in this distributed environment,” she says. “And there is something real in that.”
Cisco has avoided RTO mandates and leaned into designing an appealing “workplace experience,” but, Jones notes that the spontaneous connection and mentorship that arise in in-person interactions can be harder to create at a distance—and that is where “the culture actually lives.”
Instead of jumping to full-time, in-office work, she says AI can “change the complete calculus” on that conversation. Using AI to absorb the more routine, transactional, “heads-down” work creates more space for humans to connect in ways that feel more intentional and impactful.
In so doing, AI becomes a “forcing function” to reimagine why you’re bringing people together. It can be a key factor in helping leadership “stop mandating presence for presence’s sake” and to instead design in-person work for the moments where real, human connection is possible.
“The organizations that get this right can stop the consistent fighting, the RTO battle, because they’ll have answered the question: What are we actually coming together for?” Jones says. “If we answer that question and it’s clear and it’s compelling, then you don’t have to mandate.”
Those that do introduce mandates—particularly as they ramp up AI integration—are facing real culture risk, she says.
Many organizations are using RTO as a “blunt instrument” to signal control at the exact moment employees are anxious about losing control to AI.
“That combination of ‘We’re automating work and we’re also mandating where you sit’ is a trust-destroying sequence,” Jones says. “It signals that the organization is optimized for its own comfort and not its people’s.”
Instead, flip the narrative and look to AI as a tool to give employees back time, control and cognitive bandwidth.
“If it’s done well, it’s going to deepen belonging rather than erode it,” Jones says, “which is a really powerful thing.”
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