Research Spotlight: When Office Mandates Reshape Federal Work

That lived transition is at the center of a new study by Geneviève Morin, Carey Doberstein, and Étienne Charbonneau. Rather than treating return-to-office policy as a simple question of where people sit, the article asks what happens when a work arrangement that employees had come to associate with autonomy, trust, and effectiveness is abruptly reversed.

We spoke with one of the authors, Geneviève Morin of the École nationale d’administration publique, to learn more about how U.S. federal employees made sense of return-to-office mandates after years of telework and hybrid work.

Work location policy is often debated in abstract terms: productivity, real estate, supervision, fairness, and culture. This article brings the discussion back to employee experience by showing how federal workers explained the effects of mandated office attendance in their own words.

For public administration and organizational research, the study is valuable because it examines the reversal of telework rather than only its adoption. That shift matters because a return mandate does not simply restore an earlier workplace. It can also signal how much discretion, trust, and professional judgment an organization is willing to grant its employees.

Dr. Morin reflected on the broader significance of the study: “If there’s one takeaway for public sector leaders, it’s that how a policy is implemented matters as much as the policy itself. A mandate imposed without regard for role differences or prior performance will be read as arbitrary, even if the underlying goal is legitimate.”

The article identifies three connected themes that help explain why the mandate felt so consequential to many respondents.

• Affective crisis and erosion of trust. Frustration and anger rose from 11 percent of comments before the mandate to 31 percent immediately after the announcement and 33 percent as implementation unfolded. Respondents linked these feelings to stress, poor office conditions, and a sense that leadership decisions were arbitrary or disconnected from how work was actually done.
• Perceived performance impairment. Comments coded as reduced performance increased from roughly 10 percent before the mandate to 33 percent after the announcement and 28 percent during implementation. Many employees viewed the office requirement as adding commuting time, distractions, and virtual meetings taken from office desks, rather than improving collaboration or output.
• Loss of control and reduced autonomy. This concern was nearly absent in the earlier hybrid work period, then appeared in 12 percent of comments after the mandate and 19 percent during implementation. Respondents often framed the change as a loss of professional discretion, especially when uniform attendance rules ignored role differences, location realities, or previously effective hybrid routines.

Looking across the responses, Dr. Morin highlighted the need to take employee interpretation seriously: “The sheer scale of the shift stood out to me — frustration and anger tripled, from about 11 percent of comments before the mandate to over 30 percent after. That’s not a marginal reaction; it’s a widespread one.”

The study draws on qualitative data from three national surveys of U.S. federal employees conducted through Federal News Network Pulse Surveys. The April 2024 wave included 6,338 respondents and 30,436 open-ended comments, the January 2025 wave included 4,662 respondents and 2,598 comments, and the March 2025 wave included 5,526 respondents and 6,754 comments. In total, the corpus included 39,788 comments from 16,526 respondents across the three waves.

The authors treated the survey waves as independent cross-sectional snapshots, not as a panel following the same people over time. They cleaned and organized the comments by survey wave, question, and comment-level text unit, then used a predefined thematic grid based on their conceptual framework. Because the dataset was large and interpretive, the analysis combined AI-assisted coding with human validation and thematic interpretation by the research team.

The article explains that all 39,788 open-ended comments were imported into Evidano Pro, then known as AILYZE Pro, which helped identify conceptual patterns across comments by contextual meaning rather than simple keyword matching.

The researchers provided Evidano with a predefined thematic grid derived from the conceptual framework. Evidano then generated a coding matrix and exemplar excerpts, while the research team reviewed, refined, and validated the outputs. The article is careful on this point, stating that “AI outputs were reviewed and subjected to manual verification checks before being retained” and that “the AI tool did not generate interpretations or theoretical claims.”

Dr. Morin also noted how AI tools can support careful research workflows when used responsibly: “The key thing for other researchers to keep in mind is that AI-assisted coding is a starting point, not a substitute for judgment. We validated every theme against the original comments ourselves before drawing any conclusions.”

Evidano helped organize and code a large body of open-ended survey material, but the authors retained responsibility for the conceptual framework, validation decisions, interpretation, and scholarly judgment. AI assisted the workflow; it did not replace expert analysis.

For researchers, the article shows both the promise and the limits of large-scale qualitative evidence. Thousands of comments can reveal patterns that are hard to see through small samples alone, but the authors also emphasize caution. The findings reflect perceptions and interpretations from self-selected respondents, not objective measures of productivity or a causal estimate of policy effects.

For public sector leaders, the study suggests that return-to-office policy cannot be evaluated only through visibility or space use. Employees interpreted the mandate through questions of trust, fairness, autonomy, and whether office presence actually matched the work they were expected to perform.

For organizations weighing future work arrangements, Dr. Morin offered a concise takeaway: “The practical lesson is that uniform attendance rules rarely fit the reality of different roles. Policymakers should build in flexibility for teams that had already proven hybrid work was effective, rather than applying a single rule across the board.”

The broader lesson is not that one work arrangement fits every role. It is that imposed workplace transitions carry emotional and symbolic meaning, especially when employees have already demonstrated that flexible work can support focus, morale, and service delivery. By listening closely to how employees explain these changes, leaders can design policies that preserve organizational capacity while taking human experience seriously.