Somewhere in a downtown office tower this month, an employee badged in at 9:02 a.m., poured a cup of coffee, said hello to two colleagues, and left by 9:40. On the attendance report, that counts as a full day in the office. In a 2026 survey of 1,000 employees under stricter return-to-office policies, Enhancv found that 46% admit to doing exactly this — a practice now known as “coffee badging” (Enhancv, 2026).
It is a strange way to spend a commute. The employee still pays for the train ticket, still sits in traffic, still gets up earlier. And then hands the company almost none of what the mandate was written to produce: sustained collaboration, mentoring, spontaneous problem-solving. Why absorb the cost of compliance while deliberately withholding the value it was supposed to buy?
The behavioral-science answer is psychological reactance, and it explains a great deal more than office attendance.
The Freedom You Didn’t Know You’d Threatened
In 1966, psychologist Jack Brehm proposed that people hold a set of freedoms they believe they possess — including freedoms they never had to think about, because no one had tried to take them away. When one of those freedoms is threatened or removed, people become motivated to restore it: resisting, discounting the source of the restriction, or finding another way to reassert control (Brehm, 1966; Steindl et al., 2015).
For several pandemic years, “where I work” quietly moved from a managerial decision into something many employees experienced as their own. That is the reference point return-to-office mandates run into. The office itself hasn’t changed. What changed is whether showing up feels like a request or a repossession.
The Numbers Behind the Resistance
The scale of the compliance-without-commitment problem shows up clearly in the data. Required office time rose approximately 12% between 2024 and 2025 — but actual attendance rose only 1% to 3% (Flex Index, 2025). Companies pushed hard. Behavior barely moved.
Enhancv’s research adds the psychological layer: 72% of surveyed employees suspect RTO mandates are a “stealth layoff” strategy meant to drive voluntary attrition, and more than a third have applied for another job while sitting at their current desk (Enhancv, 2026). Whether that suspicion is accurate at any individual company is almost beside the point — once employees believe the stated reason isn’t the real one, the mandate stops being a workplace policy and becomes, psychologically, an adversarial act.
The business case fares no better. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business examined return-to-office mandates across S&P 500 firms and found a significant decline in employee job satisfaction, with no corresponding improvement in firm profitability or market valuation (Ding & Ma, 2023). Turnover rose most sharply among senior-level and highly skilled employees — the people with the most outside options are also the ones most able to exercise reactance through the door.
Compliance Is Not Adoption
This is where the lesson stops being about office space. Every CEO eventually issues a mandate: a new CRM discipline, an approved AI platform, a pricing floor, a sales methodology. The mistake is assuming that clarity plus authority equals adoption.
A salesperson can enter opportunity data without managing the pipeline. An employee can sit at a desk without collaborating. A rep can follow the required call sequence and never ask a real discovery question. Reactance doesn’t eliminate the visible behavior — it hollows out the purpose behind it. And the visible behavior is usually all a dashboard measures.
Redesigning the Mandate, Not the Authority
None of this argues against leadership authority. Some things — safety, security, financial controls — legitimately cannot be optional. The lever leaders actually control is how much perceived autonomy survives inside a necessary constraint.
Self-determination research offers a useful reframe: autonomy isn’t the freedom to do anything; it’s the experience of a behavior as self-endorsed rather than imposed (Deci & Ryan, 2000). A team told “you decide which two days you’re together” experiences a materially different mandate than a team told “be here Tuesday through Thursday” — even when the organizational outcome is identical.
Before the next mandate goes out, three questions do most of the work:
- Is this constraint actually necessary, or just easier to enforce than to explain?
- Have we explained the business problem, not just announced the policy?
- Are we measuring the outcome we actually want, or just the compliance we can see on a badge log?
That last question is the tell. A policy that only works while someone is watching produced compliance, not adoption — and compliance rarely shows up on the revenue line.
The Revenue Connection
Growth strategies live or die on behaviors nobody can fully mandate: accurate pipeline management, genuine customer curiosity, real adoption of a new tool. You can require the login. You cannot require the judgment. The companies that grow fastest aren’t the ones issuing the most directives — they’re the ones that have learned which behaviors need a rule, and which ones just need a reason.
Before your next companywide mandate — CRM discipline, AI adoption, a new pricing floor — run it through the Growth Engine Scorecard at richmsmith.com/scorecard to see where you’re building buy-in, and where you’re only buying compliance.
References
Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Academic Press.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Ding, Y., & Ma, M. (2023). Return-to-office mandates (SSRN Working Paper No. 4675401). University of Pittsburgh, Katz Graduate School of Business. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4675401
Enhancv. (2026). The RTO stealth layoff study. https://enhancv.com/blog/rto-stealth-layoffs/
Flex Index. (2025). The Flex Report: Q3 2025. https://www.flexindex.com/stats
Steindl, C., Jonas, E., Sittenthaler, S., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Understanding psychological reactance: A new agenda for translational science. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223(4), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000222
