The work from home option for employees seems to be in its final leg as Sander van’t Noordende, the global CEO of Randstad, a hiring firm, said in an interview
to Fortune that the return-to-office war is effectively over. He also highlighted a new pecking order when it comes to in-office attendance vs work from home. As companies push more employees back to the office, the chief executive of the world’s largest talent firm says fully remote work is increasingly being reserved for top performers. “You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job,” Sander van ’t Noordende told Fortune. “That’s increasingly the story. You have to have very special technology skills or some expertise.” Van’t Noordende also pointed to the rise of freelance work but said it, too, is not for everyone. “The whole phenomenon of freelance work has been coming up, of course, over the last decades… but that also requires also special skills -- good commercial skills or networking skills, which not everybody has.” What van’t Noordende says he is seeing on the ground echoes a prediction made earlier this year by Korn Ferry. As companies tighten in-office requirements, the consulting firm forecast the emergence of a “new hybrid hierarchy,” where workplace flexibility becomes a benefit available mainly to high-value employees. “2025’s Haves and Have-Nots will be divided not by economics, but by talent and how much the company wants them,” the report said. This year, Amazon mandated its employees to return to five days per week to office, and thereafter many tech giants took a similar route. Over the following months, a growing list of major companies - including Dell, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, Snap, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Disney and AT&T - rolled out similar return-to-office mandates for employees. The year ended with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri asking staff to work from the office five days a week. According to a companywide memo sent by Mosseri, US employees will be required to return to the office full time starting February 2.
