In a new survey 75% of firms plan to reduce their office space, yet 88% require a certain number of days in the office—with both figures up from last year.

Return-to-office mandates are increasingly common, but companies are rapidly downsizing their offices and worried about whether they’ll be able to keep their current ones.

That’s the seemingly paradoxical upshot of a new survey by the Boston-based workplace strategy firm Robin, which questioned over 500 business owners and facilities managers about their office-space plans and remote-work and return-to-office policies.

The results show that 88% of companies now mandate that employees work a certain number of days in the office, up from 69% a year ago. Yet 75% plan to reduce office square footage next year, compared to 46% in 2022.

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    39•1 year ago

    “It looks like an opposing trend but it’s really not,” Robin CEO Micah Remley told the Boston Globe. “Over the past year, we’re finally seeing companies have a vision of what they want to accomplish in their office space, and they’re putting those plans into action.”

    What they want, he said, is “a flexible office space deeply focused on collaboration.”

    Lenny Beaudoin, executive managing director at real estate firm CBRE, added, “Organizations held more space in the past for contingency, and what they’re realizing is, through hybrid work and the way their employees are actually utilizing the space, they can actually reduce some of the space.”

    Translation: “We realized that office space doesn’t add to productivity, but we feel impotent without employees in the office to lord over.”