Employee shares how his company's RTO policy disrupted his life: 'Commuting isn't cheap'

A London-based employee says company's RTO mandate has increased costs, reduced time and forced him and his girlfriend to rethink their routine.

A London-based employee has claimed that his company’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate has disrupted not just his daily routine but also his relationship, finances and sense of balance. In an as-told-to essay published in Business Insider, the employee, who was not named, reflected on how being asked to return to the office after a long stretch of remote work has altered the life he and his girlfriend had built together.

He said that the RTO policy has not damaged their relationship, but it has revealed how deeply it was shaped by shared proximity. (Representational image/Unsplash)

“I hadn’t always been a believer in working from home,” he wrote, adding, “When remote work first became part of my life, I resisted it”. Over time, however, he said he found an unexpected rhythm. “Mornings became mine. I cooked real lunches. I thought more clearly,” he told the Business Insider.

More significantly, he and his girlfriend, who have been living together in London for a year, had structured their shared life around being at home together. “I’ve stopped seeing remote work as a compromise and started seeing it as the better version of my day,” he wrote.

However, he said that his life changed when his company announced its RTO policy. “It wasn’t just a scheduling change,” he said. “It was a disruption to something we had spent months building, a routine that had come to feel like the foundation of everything else,” he continued.

The employee said that the shift has been uneven. He shared that while he now commutes to London each morning, his girlfriend continues to work remotely. He said that the asymmetry has required more deliberate conversations about responsibilities and routines that previously evolved organically.

“The small, invisible agreements that hold a shared life together suddenly need to be spoken out loud,” he wrote, describing the recalibration as revealing, if not outright disruptive.

Financial impact of RTO

He also pointed to the financial impact. Daily commuting costs, from train fares to lunches and incidental expenses, have quickly added up. “We had saved money by being home,” he noted, adding that the financial buffer they once enjoyed has begun to shrink.

But time, he said, has been the biggest casualty. “The commute is carving hours out of the day that had previously been ours. Mornings that once felt spacious have become logistical, and evenings are now shortened. The long, unhurried romantic dinners that had been a quiet anchor in our week are starting to require more effort to protect. Time, it turns out, had been our most abundant resource when we were both at home. We hadn't noticed until it started running out,” he wrote.

There is also what he described as an “energy cost.” Office life, while stimulating, leaves him more depleted. “The version of me that walks through the door at the end of the day is not quite the same one that used to simply close the laptop and call it done,” he wrote.

He said that the RTO policy has not damaged their relationship, but it has revealed how deeply it was shaped by shared proximity. “A shared lunch, a passing conversation in the kitchen, the low-level awareness of each other that comes with being in the same space. Those things weren't dramatic, but their absence has been,” the employee said.

“We are now trying to be more intentional,” he wrote, adding, “It isn’t a strain exactly; it’s a recalibration.”

“We have only been doing this for a few weeks. Something tells me the real adjustments are still ahead,” he concluded.