Return-to-Office Mandate: The key to compliance during transition

In August 2025, Doug Ford, Ontario’s Premier, mandated that 60,000 public employees go back to the office four days a week. This followed the return-to-office mandate for federal employees in the U. S. by Donald Trump, former President of the U.S., on January 20, 2025 and as part of a trend in both public and private sectors. 

This shift brings one of the most challenging transitions for professionals in the public sector, including CHCOs/CHROs, RTW coordinators, HR managers, and occupational health to bring employees back to the office after years of remote and hybrid models. HR are asked to design return-to-office programs that protect rights, ensure compliance, and address cultural resistance. 

Besides these complications, this policy change affects many layers of organizational operations that may constantly bring new challenges as employees come back to the office. To execute a successful return-to-office and return-to-work program, this demands an interconnected system, accountability and leadership. 

In this article, we’ll dive into the complexities this mandates bring, the employees’ perspective and the employers’ perspective and most importantly, the system capabilities that will help HR leaders to effectively implement this complex transition. 

Compliance challenges in today’s changing workplace

Return-to-work and return-to-office mandates redefine the psychological contract between an employee and the employer. What was the norm before in-person work became a benefit with remote flexibility? Now, HR leaders in the public sector are expected to reverse this. 

Canadian federal departments have struggled with inconsistent tracking for attendance and uneven compliance due to legacy systems and fragmented data. This became a challenge for HR professionals to enforce attendance and assess adherence to the policy.  

The tensions have been rising with the struggle to enforce this return-to-office policy, with workforce resistance, increasing the difficulty of reconciling organizational goals with employee expectations.  

Unlike private companies, public organizations face different challenges where a single return-to-office policy may affect employees covered by different unions that contain distinct clauses.  

The complexity goes beyond when we explore: 

• Evolving interpretations of human rights 

• Multiple, overlapping collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) 

• Fragmented data on email chains, spreadsheets and paper files to manage cases 

• Different job accommodation requests under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the Canadian Human Rights Code 

HR leaders who attempt to manage return-to-office or return-to-work mandates without a digital system capable of accommodating the unique provisions of each Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) expose their organizations to significant risks. These include inconsistent application of policies, non-compliance with terms and potential legal challenges.  

The results may end with non-compliance escalations: 

Inconsistent attendance tracking and uneven policy application can trigger individual grievances and accommodation disputes. 

Missed CBA timelines, incomplete case files or undocumented decisions lead to arbitration exposure, complaints and union challenges. 

Risk of public trust loss with a pattern of non‑compliance that can draw media interest and impact brand, talent attraction and retention, especially among critical roles. 

A centralized, automated system that can scale and adapt to the organization’s processes, like Sodales, is essential to ensure fairness, transparency and compliance with CBAs obligations, regulations and respective laws while implementing the return-to-office and return-to-work mandates. 

Employees’ perspective about return-to-office mandate

The recent CBC interview with Linda Duxbury, Professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, highlighted the ongoing debate and conflicting views regarding the return-to-office mandate.  

The Angus Reid Institute found that 59% of Canadian workers would prefer to do most of their work at home, if possible, while 76% of employees who have already worked remotely prefer continuing to work from home. 

Beyond this, employees’ resistance to the return-to-work mandate is rooted in needs. According to data from The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), employees feel this new policy impacts their: 

• Emotional and practical reasons 

• • Work-life balance: Remote work reduced commute stress and enabled personal responsibility for time management. 

• • Job Accommodation: People with health conditions who are required to be in the office face real obstacles that threaten their job security and safety at the worksite when the employer doesn’t provide proper accommodation. 

• • Caregiving responsibilities: Women workers with caregiving responsibilities report having concerns about the negative effects of scheduling conflicts and the impact on their career decisions with this new mandate.  

• Rights and legal considerations: Legal frameworks such as human rights and CBAs may dictate that not every return-to-office request is discretionary and certain cases may be considered for potential job accommodations to avoid legal escalations.

• Generational expectations and post-pandemic shifts: Younger generations joining the workforce seek more than just the pay, placing greater emphasis on family, meaningful work, a sense of community and personal well-being due to the lack of channels to express their discomfort or negotiation and social media mass support, which influences their acceptance of RTW and RTO requirements. 
   

The problem for HR professionals lies in staying fair and compliant with each case, following the CBAs, laws and regulations. The reality for them is that accommodation requests tied to medical, disability, caregiving or religious needs require case-by-case assessments.  

A lack of documentation along the process, insufficient flexibility to explore alternatives and not meeting CBA timelines increases the likelihood of human rights complaints and arbitration losses. 

Public sector leadership: The employer’s Viewpoint

Employers adopt return-to-office and return-to-work mandates as strategic decisions that shape organizational culture and align with business priorities. There are key objectives: 

• Operational Drivers: Employers cite these benefits for returning to work in physical workspaces: 

• • Increased collaboration and mentorship opportunities 

• • Strengthening organizational culture 

• • Better alignment with strategic goals  

• Balancing enforcement: HR teams report mixed compliance results and significant internal debate about the right level of enforcement for this policy. 

• Legal and compliance obligations: HR leaders understand that this return-to-office mandate is not just operational but brings legal and cultural implications. They are challenged to implement it while avoiding legal risks, such as claims for a contractual arrangement, grievances due to lack of fairness or compliance and reputational damage. 

According to Sara Jansen Perry, Ph.D., Professor of Management at Baylor University, it’s essential that employers understand what employees feel and why. Emotional resistance follows from a perception of loss of autonomy and concern about personal stability, which leads them to distrust leadership. 

When policies are enforced without audit‑ready documentation or misapplication of CBAs, organizations struggle to defend decisions during grievance hearings or human rights reviews. Missing evidence, late responses or inconsistent outcomes are common root causes of adverse findings and reputational damage. 

Essential elements for building a compliant return-to-office Program

Given the complexities we’ve highlighted in this article, public sector organizations need a coherent, structured and data-driven approach in their return-to-office and return-to-work program that is centred on labor relations and compliance. To achieve this, it’s crucial that HR leaders contemplate the following: 

• Centralized Labor Relation System: HR leaders need to transition from reactive and manual case tracking to a centralized system like Sodales that captures, manages from intake to resolution, all employee interactions in a compliant and auditable manner. 

• Job Accommodation Management: The RTO and RTW programs need to include clear procedures for managing job accommodation requests, whether for medical, disability, caregiving or religious needs. The workflows must align with the respective legal requirements and CBAs obligations. This is not possible with legacy or fragmented systems.

• Grievance Management: Things may not go as planned; therefore, organizations need to be ready to manage grievances. The complexity of this escalates when unionized employees are part of various CBAs that contain different requirements and timelines. When grievances are manually tracked, they usually end up with missed hearings and escalations for insufficient evidence or proper communication. 

• Transparency, fairness and accountability. When managing RTO and RTW programs, transparent communication and fair policy applications are essential for smoother transitions and compliance. Keeping track of decisions and actions taken is also crucial when transitioning. 

• Data and compliance monitoring: The public sector has been challenged to enforce this new policy. The reality is that without a system that enables data and compliance tracking and monitoring, HR leaders may face inconsistencies, which could directly impact their compliance. 

• Unified case management: HR leaders need to have every accommodation request, safety concern or complaint accessible in an auditable system with all the relevant documentation, people involved, timeline, evidence and information. This is not possible when one case is scattered across different emails, spreadsheets, messages, audios, paper documents, etc. 

Given the legal and reputational risks, HR teams need a system that prevents missed deadlines, standardizes policy application and workflows and proves fairness with audit‑ready records to avoid grievances or complaints escalate. 

Simplify compliant RTO & RTW programs with Sodales 

Sodales is the only AI-powered, unified platform purpose-built for the complexities of highly regulated and unionized environments like the public sector. These capabilities address the return-to-office and return-to-work mandate challenges: 

• Centralized Employee & Labor Relations Management
  Sodales unified platform brings compliance processes together. It collects real-time data across not only employee and labor relations, but also health and safety. It provides a single source of truth for all employee relations and labor relations data, like complaints, disciplines, job accommodation requests, grievances, and more, making it easier for HR leaders to implement the RTO and RTW transition. 

• Embedded CBAs with multi-union & multi-CBA support 
  Sodales integrates the rules and requirements of the CBAs and their respective unions with separate workflows and automated alerts for deadlines. HR teams can access searchable CBAs instead of looking into a 200-page printed document, saving significant time.

  Furthermore, with Sodales AI CBA Lookup, HR professionals can get role-specific answers and interpret policy information across multiple union agreements in seconds by asking a specific prompt.  

• Job accommodation case management 
  Sodales enables HR teams to track and manage every job accommodation request while detecting and analyzing trends. Each case ensures alignment with applicable federal, state, union and organizational policies for medical, religious, ergonomic, telework, restricted duty requests and ADA case requests.  

• Automated grievance, complaint and discipline workflows  
  Sodales automates timelines to ensure consistency for all cases. You can track and resolve individual, group and policy grievances that can be linked to claims, disciplines and complaints. From intake, investigation, application of disciplinary actions and closure of cases, HR teams can involve all the required stakeholders with strict privacy settings to protect sensitive information. 

• Audit-ready documentation 
  With Sodales, every action within the system is role-based registered, recorded and exportable for audits or in case of legal issues. HR teams can quickly generate a complete case history in minutes with all the information related to a case available in one place, from intake to resolution. 

• Seamless integration with public sector HRIS 
  Whether you’re using SAP, Workday, Dayforce, UKG, Oracle, or any other HCM, Sodales quickly integrates and ensures the safety of data with public sector security requirements. 

Return-to-office and return-to-work mandates are way more than policies; they represent a test for an organization’s adaptability and technological transformation. It’s an opportunity to replace legacy systems and fragmented processes with a human-centered approach. 

Sodales enables this shift by unifying all processes, policies and regulations in one interconnected platform to protect both employees and employers. It empowers leaders with data-driven insights to make informed decisions.  

With five million users in hundreds of countries, our system is globally trusted. 

Book a demo today to discover how Sodales can help your organization to implement compliant return-to-office and return-to-work mandates while increasing productivity, consistency and transparency across all processes.