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Many companies have been rattling on the return-to-the-office hype over the past year, with mixed reactions.

Some people have enjoyed the return to in-person collaboration, while others don’t want to give up the flexibility and convenience that the WFH-in-your-PJs lifestyle has brought. And of course some people were here all the time. (We see you.)

Organizations have tried to figure out how best to implement these policies, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently announced that employees are expected to return to the office three days a week in the spring. On the same day, employees set up a Slack channel to vent their frustration. In less than a week, 14,000 employees had joined the Slack channel, and a petition began circulating asking the company to rescind the policy.

Based on some feedback that’s surfaced on Slack, Reddit, and elsewhere, many employees seem to have been taken aback by the announcement.

The petition used language like the RTO mandate that “shook their confidence in management,” and some have speculated that it might be a way to get more people to quit. News of the RTO mandate came less than a month after the company announced plans to lay off 18,000 workers.

This is all compounded by the fact that many non-office workers — like Amazon drivers and warehouse workers — haven’t had a break in their routines.

In pretty much every company there are employees who really like and/or enjoy going to the office. Maybe they don’t have a good, quiet place to work at home. Maybe it’s stressful at home. Or maybe they just like having a place to go.

The backlash at Amazon and elsewhere seems to stem from employees feeling surprised and misled by RTO mandates that flexible working from home or hybrid options would always be there. For example, what do you say to people who have moved and bought houses in other cities because they promised there were flexible options?

In January, Disney issued its own RTO mandate, only they went up one and made it in the office FOUR days a week. There was a quick backlash from employees, and they too circulated a petition asking the company to withdraw the mandate.

General Motors, Starbucks, Apple and Twitter are among other big companies that have started calling employees back into the office. At first it looked like it would work. But now it’s not so clear.

“Onsite work requirements are being reintroduced, but employers are pushing them back because employees are increasingly unwilling to meet these requirements and companies are unsure or hesitant about how to enforce them even though they are technically in place,” Caitlin Duffy, research director at Gartner, told CNBC Make It.

This uncertainty has been evident in the data for the past month. The percentage of employees returning to the office had been rising steadily over the past year, but fell from 55% in November to 50% in January, according to LinkedIn research. In the same period, the number of teleworkers even increased from 25% to 28%. About 18% of workers currently work on a hybrid schedule.

A month doesn’t make a trend – it can be a seasonal thing or a one-time thing. But some experts wonder if the backlash is prompting some companies to put the brakes on RTO plans lest they face a mass exodus of employees.

Employers do their best to really sell RTO by marketing it to employees with words like collaboration, socialization, and free snacks. But many employees have found benefits and balance in working from home while still being productive. Her messages use words like home, kids, and yoga pants.

Nearly 7 in 10 workers (68%) said they would rather quit than return to work in a survey conducted by financial advisory firm Clarify Capital.

The biggest annoyance? Commuting to work (45%) followed by commuting home later (44%). People also reported having to spend more money on lunch and work clothes, having to wear work clothes, not being home with their children and pets, and being expected to meet up with co-workers.

More than a quarter (27%) said they would try to negotiate higher salaries if asked to return to the office.

In the Amazon petition, employees cited internal data that most employees prefer to work remotely with perhaps a monthly meeting, or be in the office a day or two a week at most, according to The Washington Post.

CNBC conducts its own informal poll on LinkedIn and the results are similar: so far, around 29% have said they would like to work fully remotely, while 37% said they only did 1-2 days a week. Take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments.

It seems that the hardest part of all of this is the “mandate” part – employees would prefer to have choices rather than a rigid requirement.

What’s next? Will companies just continue to incrementally increase the number of days workers are required to return despite employee protests, simply dropping the chips where they can (i.e. some employees will quit)?

Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies home office issues, said he never sees employees being in the office five days a week again.

“Professionals and executives are not going back to five days a week for the simple reason that it’s not profitable for companies to do it,” Bloom said. “Employees are much happier when they work from home a day or two a week, which boosts recruitment and retention. They also seem more productive when they have a quieter time at home to work one or two days a week, typically Friday and Monday, and avoid long stressful commutes.”

Bloom noted that pretty much all companies announcing a return to the office made it to two, three, or four days — few actually say they have to be five days a week.

Bloom was with this WFH study well before the pandemic. In a 2015 study, Bloom and some other researchers found that call center workers at a Chinese travel agency who worked arbitrarily from home or the office for nine months were actually more productive when working from home .

This study was about employees doing repetitive tasks that can be easily monitored, Bloom explained.

“These types of employees are now typically working completely remotely, people like HR, payroll, IT support, etc,” Bloom said. “But managers and professionals who are typically college graduates are more likely to work in teams in more creative roles and standardize towards hybrid with typically three days a week in the office.”

This should not diminish the advantage of personal cooperation.

“Some of the best learning experiences I’ve ever had came from mentors I personally interacted with once a month. Some of the best collaborations I’ve had have been working with teams that would get together for three or four days and then it was divide and conquer,” said Adam Grant, professor of organizational psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, in a recent Interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“[T]he reality is when you look at it [Stanford professor] Data from Nick Bloom shows that people are more likely to stay in a hybrid structure. They can do just as much if they are only in the office half the week, and in many cases even better, because flexibility motivates.”

Google’s cloud unit had an inexpensive, somewhat crude solution to this whole hybrid conundrum: They said, OK, you only have to come into the office two days a week — Monday and Wednesday, or Tuesday and Thursday. The catch is that you have to share a desk.

They also made it sound really doable: “Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and set norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment.”

I feel like there’s just one small problem with that logic: how do you deal with it? Do you connect sloppy people with other sloppy people? Have everyone pack and unpack her gear like we’re camping, then give her a hazmat treatment in between to sanitize?

I don’t consider myself a slob per se, but I certainly wouldn’t want to share a desk with me. There are crumbs and spills and dog hair. Then there’s the whole idea of ​​touching common surfaces. Let’s say Mr Monday-Wednesday has a cold or a virus or something. The other colleague could possibly have that by Thursday and now you have two people out there. What does that do to productivity?

We also did a poll on this just to read the room. It turns out that most people aren’t interested: 65% said they don’t want to share a desk.

I’d say this: If I only had to come into the office once or twice a month I’d consider sharing a desk – though subject to having a great cleaning staff who hose the stuff down like the future of mankind depends on it.

Regardless of the permutation, Bloom says hybrid work-from-home schedules are here to stay.

“Hybrid WFH has become completely dominant as it is a win-win situation. It makes more money for companies as they save a ton in recruiting, retention and labor costs and get higher productivity,” Bloom said. “It makes employees happier as they avoid commuting twice a week, which we know from surveys 20 years ago is the most uncomfortable part of a typical person’s day, worse than at work. So this is here to stay and it’s good for businesses and workers.”

What do you think about the future of work? Do you think employers will start to move away from return-to-office mandates and offer more flexible, blended schedules? Or do you think it’s full steam ahead, everyone boarding the back-to-work train? Would you be willing to share a desk if it meant you would spend less time in the office? Share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn.