WFH is becoming RTO. Political leaders and CEOs worldwide are telling staff to stop working from kitchen tables, spare rooms, sofas and back gardens and return to the office.

President Trump ordered the entire U.S. Federal government back to the office five days a week just hours after his inauguration in January. A few days earlier, Wall Street giant JPMorgan announced it was ending its hybrid work experiment and insisting staff return to their desks, bringing it in line with competitors, notably Goldman Sachs. Amazon and Dell Technologies are following Wall Street’s moves. U.S. firms are trying to reset expectations for both staff and the business, argues Michael Gibbs, professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

It’s the same story in Europe, with Boots, the UK drugstore chain, and marketing behemoth WPP among the many firms mandating that staff turn up at the office at least four days a week. Stuart Rose, the former boss of leading UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Asda, recently warned that working from home is creating a generation of young Britons who are not doing “proper work.”

However, along with these grumbles, plenty of employers are also looking to win and retain staff by offering perks – from dog-friendly offices to degrees.

The best office perks

To help cushion the blow of his RTO edict, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, will soon open a 60-floor skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. The building will offer cycling rooms, meditation spaces, yoga studios, an outdoor terrace and a food hall that insiders say will look more crunchy than Whole Foods.

Those perks are only the start. Companies are offering ever more imaginative ways to try to lure and retain staff. Google has long offered some of the best perks in Silicon Valley. The last time I ate in the complimentary canteen at its Mountain View campus, there was an oyster bar. (No champagne, alas). Also on offer were complimentary gym classes (to work off the pounds all the free food has piled on) and on-site massages to enjoy after a workout.

Now Google offers employees four “work from anywhere” weeks per year. It also uses technology to help office staff cope with the stresses tech can cause, using the mindfulness app Pause and virtual peer-to-peer mental health community Blue Dot. Just in case those do not work, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has experimented with introducing extra days off, called “reset days.”

Spending time with your pet is often the best way to cope with the travails of office life and, in Amazon’s $4bn headquarters in downtown Seattle, the dogs have some of the best views, as I found out when I visited the new complex. The in-house dog run is on a terrace overlooking the Spheres, the 90-foot-high and 130-foot-wide glass domes filled with 40,000 plants. Modeled on the greenhouses at London’s Kew Gardens, they are a place for employees “to feel differently, to think differently,” Amazon says. (Not for too long, though. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, monitors the time his employees spend there).

For those lucky enough to work for a company whose offices are near the ocean, employees can get free beach time. Staff at clothing company Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, California, can head to the beach whenever they want, and even hit the swells for a “surf break”. The company has daily surf reports at its reception desk. Chesapeake Energy’s Oklahoma headquarters is not quite on the beach. Nevertheless, staff at one of America’s largest natural gas companies can take scuba diving lessons in the firm’s Olympic-size swimming pool.

Dream balls and degrees

Swimming in the sea is not a year-round activity in Sweden, unless you are made of girders. So, many Swedish employers offer their workers a so-called “wellness allowance”: up to 5,000 SEK (approximately $400) tax-free a year to spend on pre-approved “wellbeing-based activities”, ranging from horse riding to Pilates.

Some firms offer other ways to help workers to keep body and soul together – and stay productive. Propellernet, an internet marketing service based in Brighton on the south coast of England, encourages its employees to check off their bucket lists with “dream balls”. Staff jot down a dream they would like to fulfil on a piece of paper and place it in the company’s gumball dispenser. When the company hits a target, managers pull a ball from the machine and make the dream come true. Two employees received tickets to the World Cup and one got funding to drive his motorbike across Africa.

Pizza and education might sound as awkward a pairing as pizza and pineapple but U.S.-based pizza chain Papa John’s offers a no-cost virtual education program for its workers called “Dough & Degrees”. It enables employees to finish high school, get a professional certificate, or even earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree. More than 600 staff have signed up for the program since it launched in 2019. It’s good for Papa John’s retention rates, as well as staff development: around 78 percent of employees who have taken courses still work at the company.

Other, smaller reward schemes can make a big difference. Asda, BP, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz use Rippl, a platform that enables managers to give ad hoc rewards to workers. Although these can be small – a voucher for a restaurant meal or movie tickets, for instance – Rippl’s managing director, Chris Brown, says the principle alone is enough to improve employee satisfaction and retention rates. “Engaged people stay,” he says.

My favorite perks overall? Ikea has introduced a buddy system. Each new recruit can be assigned a more experienced worker they can bother with questions and grumbles. (Everyone needs an office wife or husband.) If that is not your thing, Facebook, Gumtree, Moonpig and LinkedIn offer disco yoga sessions with an in-house DJ.

Will new incentives create workers who are so happy they are willing to return to the office, as Trump, JPMorgan and Stuart Rose want? Not necessarily, but companies might be banking on refuseniks. Knowing that some workers will quit rather than return to their cubicles, some chief executives see RTO orders as a well-disguised way of trimming head count. Quiet quitting – staff who slack off, rather than quit – has been replaced by what the Wall Street Journal calls “quiet cutting” — employers who reduce headcount without actually announcing job cuts. The ongoing debate around employers’ and employees’ delicate work/life balance is far from over.