California’s Return-to-Office Mandate: A Policy in Search of Evidence

California’s mandate for state employees to return to the office four days a week reveals a fundamental disconnect between how political leaders think about the workplace and how employees’ relationships with work shifted after the pandemic. Governor Newsom has stated that the rationale for requiring state employees to return to the office includes improving collaboration, cohesion, and mentorship, as well as increasing public confidence in government. According to the California State Auditor’s August 12, 2025, report, however, this workforce policy decision was made without adequate evaluation of organizational and financial evidence.

What the Audit Found

The audit found that the Governor’s Office did not use available information about employee performance, service delivery, or the costs associated with returning workers to the office before issuing the mandate. In support of its decision, the Governor’s Office provided two articles generally supporting in-person work but failed to provide California-specific performance or service-delivery data to strengthen the argument for the policy. This lack of evidence stands in contrast to the experiences reported by employees and managers who generally believed telework was effective. Office leaders surveyed identified numerous benefits, including reduced office-space costs, improved recruitment and retention, and better work-life balance for California state employees.

There appears to be a disconnect between the stated organizational concerns underlying the telework policy and the evidence demonstrating that these problems actually exist. Conversely, there is evidence to support continuing the previous two-day-in-office arrangement. In the Auditor’s examination of 19 departments occupying seven large state-owned office properties, 58% of the office space allocated to those departments was often unused. The Auditor estimated that allowing employees to telework at least three days per week could reduce the state’s office footprint by approximately 30%, potentially saving as much as $225 million annually.

Diagnosis Before Intervention

The central issue from an organizational development perspective is more than simply deciding whether employees should work remotely or in person. The more significant and consequential question is whether leaders took the time to diagnose an organizational problem before pushing a large-scale intervention forward. A four-day return-to-office mandate impacts work routines, employee expenses, managerial practices, and expectations about workplace autonomy. What is often missed in conversations about return-to-office mandates is the potential change in how employees experience the organization. Workers who have effectively demonstrated that they can perform exceedingly well from home may interpret a broad mandate as a sign that leadership does not trust their judgment or respect the reality of their full lives. Over time, these perceptions can affect employees’ morale and willingness to remain with the organization.

Organizational diagnosis should precede organizational change. If collaboration has truly declined, it calls for leaders to identify where and how the decline is occurring. If mentorship is anemic, they must determine whether physical separation is the cause or whether managers lack the structure needed to mentor employees effectively. If there is a noticeable deterioration in service delivery, the state should identify the issues and implement appropriate performance measures. Without that crucial diagnostic work, leaders cannot know for sure whether increased office attendance will actually address the problem or just give the appearance of action.

The Missing Theory of Change

What the mandate also lacks is an explicit theory of change that connects office attendance to the organizational outcomes it is intended to produce. Physical proximity can create opportunities for collaboration, but proximity alone does not guarantee meaningful interaction. Employees can easily occupy the same building while continuing to attend meetings virtually or communicate using Teams chat instead of walking over for an in-person conversation. Location can easily become a substitute for the more challenging work of designing practices that strengthen workplace relationships and cultivate an organizational culture that organically makes employees look forward to engaging with one another.

So what problem is the four-day mandate actually solving? If the official justification is rooted in organizational concerns such as productivity, collaboration, and cohesion, the Governor’s Office should be able to demonstrate where those outcomes have declined and provide evidence that increased office presence is likely to improve them. Instead, the policy risks imposing measurable costs in response to organizational problems that have not been adequately measured. Workers now face additional expenses for commuting, parking, childcare, and other costs associated with spending four days away from home. In practical terms, RTO can function as a reduction in disposable income, making the absence of a clearly demonstrated organizational benefit even more consequential. At a minimum, a workplace change of this magnitude warrants a transparent cost-benefit analysis and clearly defined outcomes so the policy’s success can be evaluated.