How middle managers can toe the line on the WFH and RTO debate

Having open and transparent communication about tangible benefits is the difference between success and failure in implementing a return-to-office strategy, one middle management expert has said.

The rapidly shifting nature of the conflict in the Middle East has led to the confirmation of a two-week agreement for the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, 8 April (AEST), which followed the halving of the fuel excise by the federal government at the end of March – making decisions surrounding the work-from-home and the return-to-office debate a hard line to toe for middle managers.

BoldHR founder Rebecca Houghton (pictured) told HR Leader that since the pandemic, work-from-home and return-to-office debates have been complicated by the differing wants of employees and executives.

“Think this is a classic example of opposing forces …. We’ve got a workforce that wants the flexibility [and] we’ve got an executive that wants the return to the office, [with] middle managers stuck in the middle,” Houghton said.

Amid these debates, Houghton noted that middle managers are the hardest hit as they are being pulled from the top and the bottom of the organisational chart.

“Middle managers are the ones that are the face and the voice of the mandate to return to the office …. They’re in absolute hell,” Houghton said.

With executives saying that culture and engagement are falling due to work-from-home, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 found that workplace engagement had indeed declined in 2025 to the lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy US$10 trillion in lost employee productivity, or 9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Interestingly, the research revealed that since 2023, lower engagement among managers has accounted for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement.

“Organisational flattening should not just be a transaction. If done, it needs to consider manager and team engagement, as well as the scope of managers’ other responsibilities,” Gallup said.

Communicating tangible benefits

Houghton stressed that middle managers are failing to convince employees to return to the office because of poor top-down communication.

“Executive leaders who may not be having these day-to-day conversations may be a little bit ignorant of the tension that [the debate] introduces,” she said.

Many organisations do not provide their employees with tangible reasons for the return to the office, Houghton said.

“Until they are really clear and can communicate that really transparently, it’s going to feel like a power play, which is why it feels so contentious and so emotive,” she said.

“The age of ‘just do what I tell you’ is well and truly over. Most people don’t like to be told what to do, and I think that really good middle managers lead with a great deal of transparency.”

With Houghton’s estimate that at least 70 per cent of organisations in the country want to push maximum coverage in the office, she stressed that these conversations are crucial.

For Houghton, instead of trying to enforce rules citing research supporting the return to office, middle managers must be transparent on what they are trying to achieve and avoid any authoritative manoeuvres.

“A lot of people react badly to mandates, regardless of what the mandate is,” she said.

One of the gaps chief human resources officers (CHROs) have is a lack of communication of the tangible benefits of the return to office for the organisation. Houghton said this would be immensely helpful so that middle managers can enforce the return.

“If middle managers are only working with a certain set of information which they know is incomplete or lacking transparency ... there isn’t anything concrete being transmitted to middle managers so that they can then transmit that with confidence to the workforce,” Houghton said.