The Return to Office Crossroads: Why Banking’s Troublemakers Must Pick a Lane

The time for indecision is over. It’s time to either lead with a clear return-to-office (RTO) strategy or risk falling behind.

In 2025, the biggest players in banking are showing their hand with their workplace strategy:

• HSBC is linking bonuses to office time, signaling that presenteeism is back in fashion.
• JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have reinforced their full in-office mandates, underlining a belief that culture and collaboration can’t survive in a digital vacuum.

These giants are done experimenting. They’re declaring war on ambiguity. And yet, many mid-size financial institutions — Cornerstone’s “troublemakers” — are still stuck in the mushy middle, hoping to coast through RTO without committing.

And while the largest institutions have already drawn a line in the sand, 2025 Cornerstone research shows that banks and credit unions continue to prioritize and pour money into digital transformation and greater analytics and automation. The contradiction? Culture and operations are still playing catch-up with this intended transformation.

The big question for leadership right now is, “What the hell are we doing with our people?”

Back-Office Is the Battleground

The need for RTO clarity is not about loan officers who meet clients over lunch or digital and technical roles that were already remote pre-COVID. It’s about the engine room:

• Deposit Operations
• Card Services
• Treasury Management Ops
• Loan Operations
• Contact Center
• Finance
• Enterprise Risk Management

These are the unsung teams that keep banking functional, consistent, and compliant. They aren’t client-facing, but they are mission-critical. And yet, they’ve borne the brunt of RTO confusion. Soft mandates, vague expectations, and virtual meeting silos have made it harder for these teams to do what they do best: solve problems together.

If collaboration is the glue, most ops teams are peeling at the corners.

Without a clear structure, informal mentoring evaporates. Cross-training falls apart. Fire drills become the norm instead of the exception. Worse yet, these cracks come at a time when efficiency and cost control are top-of-mind for banking execs, according to Cornerstone’s What’s Going On in Banking 2025 report.

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Two Paths, Two Stories

Let’s talk reality:

• A fully remote financial in California had the right idea. It embraced remote, created quarterly get-togethers, and built rituals around face time. But then came cost-cutting. Now, the institution is bracing for the long-term cultural hit. Will camaraderie survive without shared air and meals? It’s an open question.
• Contrast that with an organization in Wisconsin. It made the call early: in-office was the path. But it wasn’t a decree — it was a design. The company crafted a culture rooted in shared goals, built visibility into daily operations, and created a place where people want to show up. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a well-oiled operation that delivers results.

These stories aren’t outliers. They’re your roadmap. Because mid-size institutions have two options:

1. Emulate the bigs and make the office matter
2. Fully embrace remote, but with discipline and investment

There is no middle ground anymore.

The RTO Strategy Matrix

Here’s the gut-check framework. Where does your bank land?

The Wake-Up Call

Troublemaker banks have always had the potential to be agile leaders, not cautious followers. They’re often quicker to act than the giants, more nimble in execution, and closer to their teams. But when it comes to RTO strategy, too many mid-size financial institutions are paralyzed by “wait and see.” This isn’t strategic patience — it’s passive erosion. And it’s eating at the foundation of culture and competitiveness.

Bank leadership doesn’t get to sit this one out. Sitting on the fence with hybrid guesses and one-size-fits-none policies is a choice that leads to fragmented teams, unspoken resentment, and declining performance. You can’t claim to care about culture and collaboration while ignoring the very design that makes those things real.

So, what should executive teams do?

• Review how your teams are working today — not just by output, but by collaboration, communication, and cohesion. Check for intentionality of in-person moments that matter.
• Make a declarative choice: Are you building a remote-first culture or an office-centric one? There is no middle without a model.
• Build structure around that model: define rituals, shared norms, cadences, and tools to drive consistency.
• Overcommunicate expectations. If people are confused about where to work and why, that’s a leadership problem.
• Stop pretending culture will just happen. Culture is not a perk; it’s a product of your systems and priorities.

And here’s the kicker: 63% of banking leaders in 2025 rank efficiency, cost control, and non-interest expense as their top focus areas — yet many have no strategy to connect RTO with those outcomes. That’s the blind spot.

The takeaway? If your strategic execution is feeling a bit disjointed and if collaboration feels more like Slack messages than strategy, you’ve already made your choice by not making one. Make the cadence of your teams the heartbeat of your culture. Pick a path. Build the model. Own it.

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Chris Dell is a senior consultant at Cornerstone Advisors. Follow him on LinkedIn.