The office doesn’t fix loneliness at work

People often see the return-to-office debate in black-and-white: In-person work fosters connection, while remote work breaks it down. In 2025, 37% of companies required office attendance, up from 17% the year before. Companies like Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T have all issued similar mandates. The idea is simple: Bring people back to the office, and connection and engagement will follow. But the facts show something else. MIT Sloan Management Review looked at the data and found that these mandates hurt employee engagement and lead to more people leaving, especially top performers. Eight out of 10 companies said they lost talent because of return-to-office rules. The research also found no improvement in financial results from these mandates. So organizations are losing their best people and not gaining anything in return. The implicit promise of the office In our Ally Mindset™ Profile research with over 200 professionals, we asked a simple question: have you felt disconnected from your work in the past month? The results surprised me and challenged the usual way of thinking. Office-based workers reported the highest disconnection at 35%. Mostly remote workers came in at 31%. And fully remote workers, the group supposedly most at risk of isolation, reported the lowest at just 21%. The people commuting to the office every day, sitting among their colleagues, were the most likely to feel disconnected. The people working from home were the least. The question is: why? Going to the office comes with an unspoken promise. The commute, dressing for work, and arranging childcare or a dog walker all suggest that something meaningful is waiting for you. You expect to be with people. But when you get to the office, half your team is on Zoom and the rest are focused on their own work with headphones on. The open floor plan, meant for collaboration, now feels like a library where talking seems out of place. Meetings still happen on screens, even when people are just a few feet apar