Five-Day Office Mandates Spread, Reviving Interest in Team Uniforms

Published 7:59 a.m. ET

Employers are filling in a dress code gap left by hybrid work

Five-day office mandates are spreading across corporate America this year, and the employers behind them say the return has left a gap: nobody replaced the dress code that quietly disappeared during four years of hybrid and remote work.

Fidelity Investments told staff in April it would end hybrid scheduling and require five days a week in the office starting this September, timed to a move into new office space in Boston's Seaport district. Fidelity joins a list of major employers, including Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Dell, Walmart and Home Depot, that have already dropped hybrid schedules over the past year and a half.

The scale of the shift shows up in the numbers. JLL's Q2 2025 Office Market Dynamics report found that 54 percent of Fortune 100 employees are now subject to five-day office requirements, up from just 11 percent a year earlier. Flex Index, which tracks corporate attendance policy, put the share of all companies actively enforcing attendance at 37 percent by mid-2026, up from 17 percent in 2024.

For HR and facilities teams, five-day attendance means departments that spent years working in sweatpants and hoodies are suddenly sharing a building five days a week again, often without a written dress policy that still makes sense. Some employers are responding by tightening formal dress codes. Others are trying a simpler fix: put staff in the same branded polo, pullover or button-down and let the shirt set the standard instead of a memo.

"We've had more corporate teams calling this summer just to get a rough quote before they've even locked in their return date," said Conor Smart, founder of Arklavo, a custom apparel company that outfits corporate, healthcare, hospitality and school clients nationwide. "Most of them aren't trying to bring back a strict dress code. They just want everyone walking into the building to look like they work at the same company."

Why apparel is an easier fix than a written policy

A written dress code has to define vague terms like business casual for hundreds of people at once, and disputes over what counts as appropriate are common in offices that went years without enforcing one. Branded apparel sidesteps the argument. If the shirt carries the company logo, it meets the standard, no debate required.

That shift hits hardest for businesses that never went remote in the first place. Retail, healthcare, hospitality and trades employers who kept staff on site through the pandemic are now competing for the same embroidery and print capacity as the office workers just returning, and custom apparel production calendars tend to fill up fastest in the months before a seasonal shift this size. Companies building out staff uniform programs from scratch can browse Arklavo's custom corporate staff uniforms collection for the polos, pullovers and button-downs employers are ordering this summer.

Fidelity's five-day requirement takes effect in September, and Flex Index expects the enforcement share to keep rising through the rest of 2026 as more employers reach the end of the flexible-schedule commitments they made earlier in the decade.