Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

RIP REMOTE WORK. Or so says The Globe and Mail after looking at Robert Half's latest data on job postings in Q2 2026, which showed that 84 per cent of new postings were fully on-site, up from 63 per cent at the end of last year. Hybrid fell to 13 per cent from 27, and fully remote to three per cent from 10.

“This sharp decline suggests that after multiple years of announcing rollbacks to remote and hybrid policies, many companies have finalized and executed their return-to-office plans,” Robert Half said.

Could it be that the remote work era is truly dead and buried? Columnist John Turley-Ewart argues that we're just coming back to baseline.

“The future of work wasn’t remote work. It was just a solution to a crisis,” he wrote.

That’s not far from what employers have been saying since about 2021, when the in-office push really started again; many employers, particularly in more traditional sectors, have acted like remote work was nothing more than a phase.

Turley-Ewart is probably overstating things a bit. Saying we’re going back to baseline is probably wrong and understates the scale of change remote work ushered in. Still, he’s not wrong that the pendulum has swung away from remote work dramatically over the last 12 to 18 months.

“There’s a number of factors, but the number one we hear from employers is ultimately they believe that having employees collaborating [in-person] creates improved communication, improved collaboration and overall strength in the culture,” said Koula Vasilopoulos, a senior managing director for Robert Half Canada. (Of course, if you believe in remote work, the word believe is doing a lot of work there.)

If you’re currently on the job market for a new remote gig, this finding probably feels like a bit of a turd in the punchbowl. “For workers, that means more competition for fully remote roles and a near guarantee that new opportunities will come with at least some in-office time,” the report stated.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned from the see-saw labour market of the past decade, it’s that the pendulum can, and often does, swing back the other way. And for employers, it means that will likely mean they have a new carrot to dangle: “Hybrid [work] is becoming the standard way to differentiate yourself from your competitors,” Robert Half noted.

An employer’s market, just like an employee’s market, never lasts forever. Indeed, there seem to be some indications workers are getting itchy to move again, which could bring us out of the frozen job market phase. Forty-four per cent of professionals are looking, or plan to look, for a new role in the second half of the year, with a third of them saying that flexibility is something they’re after.

Remote work may look like it’s on the ropes, but unlike the Globe, we’re not calling time of death just yet. “I think that we’re going to see employees and organizations bridge the gap,” summed up Vasilopoulos, “to get to a point where employees feel satisfied and employers are getting the value they need.”

CULTURE

Going naked

The case for caseless phones: Minimalism or status symbol?

YOU, A RUBE and a simpleton, probably think it is not only natural to put your brand-new iPhone in a case, but damn near a requirement with the price of phones these days. Your boss, a leader of people and a titan of commerce and enterprise, hasn't thought about a phone case in a decade. You are not the same.

“Society as a whole,” Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.”

We can only assume he was talking about phone case vs. no phone case, the latest cleavage in the office hierarchy.

At least, that’s the gist of what a handful of image consultants told Business Insider, and it amounts to a status symbol in reverse: the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less likely you are to find a case on someone's phone.

Image consultant DeJhauna Smith said several C-suite execs she’s met are keeping their phones bare, something she reads as a sign that they know how to “carry themselves.” People do notice. “It’s an extension of your outfit,” Michelle T. Sterling, another image consultant, added. “Just like having well-groomed nails is an extension of how you’re preparing yourself and presenting yourself, your phone is also a representation of you.”

Phone cases have, in the past, sparked this exact conversation. Back in 2023, Time magazine was already calling the bare phone a “stealth wealth” signifier — the idea being, if you appear not to care whether your phone gets busted, it’s because you’re probably rolling in dough.

Regular folks have picked up the habit too, like Melissa Cepeda, a Los Angeles-based accountant who has “cracked many a screen” and goes without anyway. “It's the overall sleekness of it,” she said. “Bags are getting smaller, so my phone is naturally out more — I just bought a purse that can barely fit my ID, my keys and a credit card."

Is any of this real, or just image consultants doing, well, image consulting? Kinda, actually. A 2014 Harvard Business School study — on clothes, not phones, though the logic is similar — found that people who break dress norms on purpose (think, a professor in a T-shirt) gets read as higher-status than the people following the rules.

“Instead of showing you can afford to spend money, you’re showing you can afford to spend your social capital," said the paper’s co-author Anat Keinan. “You’re saying, ‘I’m so autonomous and successful that I can afford to dress in a nonconforming way.’”  

AI

The new workforce divide

A huge survey of 50,000 workers says AI is splitting employees into four distinct groups. Most of us are toiling in the engine room

IN THE CLASSIC movie Mean Girls, viewers are introduced to the lunchroom and its distinct cliques — the preps, varsity jocks, sexually active band geeks, desperate wannabes and so on. The modern AI-powered workplace is (at least according to a new study from PwC) somewhat similar: it’s got the AI insurgents, the front-runners, the indispensables and the engine room workers.

That’s the gist of the firm’s latest Hopes and Fears survey, which polled nearly 50,000 workers this spring and sorted them by how much AI is helping them and how hard they’d be to replace. At the top are the front-runners, the 14 per cent with in-demand skills who say AI is making them better at their jobs. The insurgents (18 per cent) have less sought-after skills but use AI ambitiously anyway, and the indispensables (11 per cent) are rare enough that they don't really need to bother with it anyways. That leaves the engine room, which is everybody else, comprising 56 per cent of workers.

“On one side, an optimistic minority group of AI-enabled front-runners who are motivated, adaptive and ready to advance — within or beyond their organizations,” the report reads. “On the other, an anxious majority group of core workers who worry about their jobs and finances, feel shut out of growth and learning and distrust their leaders.”

But it’s worth asking: how exactly does one end up in the engine room, in PwC’s conception? Pretty easily, if you’re not all-in on AI, it seems.

Anyone who doesn’t use AI gets dropped into the low-AI box automatically, and PwC lumped the bottom two of its three skill-demand tiers together, creating a big, unhappy middle that is more or less baked into its mental model of the AI workplace.

Most of the engine room said they’ve never used AI, and only a quarter say they’ve picked up new tools or seen more change in the past year. So it’s hard to tell whether they’ve been left behind by AI, or just haven’t found much use for it yet.

To some degree, this is probably PwC trying to legitimize a category system it is then going to sell to businesses — some of which might still be in 2025 mode, thinking AI can simply replace everyone (after all, looking at a list of employees labelled “engine-roomers” seems like target-on-the-back positioning). It is not the conclusion PwC wants as a takeaway here, though. The engine-roomers just require some love and attention, the company said. “For the squeezed majority in the engine room, organizations need to make learning and reskilling available without increasing workloads,” PwC said. “That should include training and tools to help them reduce financial stress.”

Does the workplace need more categories like this? That’s unclear. Does it need more consultants creating more categories? Also very debatable. “While those divisions aren't necessarily problematic on their own, they may eventually create some friction arising from the other differences between workers they produce," wrote Inc.’s Bruce Crumley.

One can imagine that a worker lightly chastised for being an engine-roomer might think these categories are a pointless endeavour, and something that doesn’t get anyone any closer to understanding what AI might do to the future of work. “Workers aren’t expecting leaders to, I think, sugarcoat everything,” PwC’s Peter Brown told Business Insider. “They just want to understand what’s going on.”

TECH

The ministry of love

The Singapore government has launched a dating platform for its public sector, drawing curiosity, amusement and scorn

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