Return to Office or “Quiet Purging”?

The return to in-person work, after years of hybrid arrangements, is no longer just an organizational choice: for a growing number of companies, it appears to have become a way to reduce headcount without resorting to actual layoffs. In the United States, the phenomenon has a name: quiet purging. The underlying idea is as simple as it is controversial: revoke or drastically reduce remote work, knowing that some employees, rather than return to the office full-time, will choose to resign on their own.

From Quiet Quitting to Quiet Purging

In recent years, workplace vocabulary has grown richer with expressions capturing the new tensions between companies and employees. First came quiet quitting – employees doing the bare minimum.

Then quiet firing – the set of behaviors through which a company makes someone’s continued employment increasingly untenable. Quiet purging takes this logic to a systemic level: it doesn’t target an individual, but changes the rules for everyone, eliminating flexibility with the expectation that resignations will do the rest of the work.

A Quiet Convenience, But Not Without Risk

For a company, the calculation is straightforward: employees who resign aren’t entitled to the same treatment as those who are laid off, litigation risk decreases, and the company avoids the reputational impact of a formal layoff plan.

Several US studies confirm this isn’t just speculation. According to a BambooHR survey, one in four executives and nearly one in five HR specialists openly admitted hoping that return-to-office mandates would push some employees to leave voluntarily, thereby avoiding formal layoffs. The most explicit case remains the reform of the US federal civil service, where proponents of the measure publicly stated they expected – and welcomed – a wave of voluntary departures.

Employees Are Shifting Their Approach

The climate, however, is changing rapidly on the employee side too. A year ago, over half of US workers said they would quit immediately if faced with a mandatory office return; today, according to a 2026 report by MyPerfectResume, that share has dropped to around 7%, as a more uncertain labour market makes people more cautious about leaving a job. Meanwhile, more employees say they’re ready to “comply” by staying at the company while calmly searching for an alternative: another recent survey indicates that about four in ten workers would respond to a full-time return mandate by looking for a new job, while only a minority would quit immediately.

Who’s Likely to Leave First

Several analyses show that relying on “voluntary” resignations carries a concrete risk: the first to leave aren’t the lowest performers, but often the most qualified employees – those with the most alternatives on the market. Multiple studies indicate that companies with stricter return-to-office policies see significantly higher turnover rates than those that kept flexible models, and a substantial share of the organizations involved admit to having lost hard-to-replace skills.

The removal of flexibility doesn’t weigh equally on everyone. Parents of young children, those caring for dependent family members, and more broadly, anyone who has built their daily routine around the ability to alternate between home and office are affected the most. For these people, remote work isn’t a secondary perk but an organizational condition; revoking it abruptly means calling their entire management of family life back into question.

And in Italy?

The Italian picture still looks very different from the US one. According to the Smart Working Observatory at Politecnico di Milano, roughly 3.57 million employees work at least part of their time remotely – a share still below the European average recorded by Eurostat. Adoption remains concentrated among large service-sector companies, while structured remote-work models are still rare among SMEs.

At present, no Italian studies have specifically examined quiet purging.

On the regulatory side, remote work in Italy is still governed by Law 81/2017: it originates from an individual agreement between company and employee, which can be revoked but must respect notice periods for open-ended contracts. Case law has further clarified that an abrupt revocation, lacking adequate notice and in conflict with the employee’s known personal circumstances, may violate the principles of fairness and good faith governing the employment relationship.

Beyond the “home or office” debate, what’s really at stake is the organizational model companies and public administrations intend to adopt in the coming years. Using the return to office as an indirect lever to reduce headcount may work in the short term, but risks producing the opposite effect: loss of strategic skills, reputational damage as an employer, and greater difficulty attracting new talent in a market that continues to reward companies capable of offering genuinely sustainable ways of working.