Some Commonwealth Bank staff have been made to travel to an office so they can join video calls with colleagues who sit interstate or overseas. That is the Finance Sector Union's account of the bank's office attendance rule, and it is the whole return-to-office debate in a single commute.

A meme doing the rounds online put the corporate logic plainly. Working from home kills collaboration. Sending entire teams to another country is a strategic operating model. It gets a laugh because Australia's big banks are running both policies at the same time, and both sit under the same banner of teamwork.

My take on this? The collaboration argument has real evidence behind it. The banks apply it to the staff they keep and drop it for the jobs they move.

Half your week in the office. Your team in another country.

What the banks tell staff, and what they do

Start with the rules. Commonwealth Bank requires staff to spend at least half their work time in the office, a rule covering roughly 49,000 people. ANZ attaches money to it. Staff who fall below 50% attendance face reduced bonuses and frozen pay rises. An ANZ spokesperson has said in-person collaboration strengthens team connections and professional development. NAB asks for three days a week from staff and four from managers.

Now the jobs. CBA India grew from about 3,000 staff in 2022 to about 7,000 by mid-2025, according to figures reported by Information Age. Over the same years the bank's Australian headcount held at around 37,000. In 2025 the union took CBA to the Fair Work Commission over cuts to local technology roles. The bank withdrew 30 online job ads for roles in India carrying the same titles as roles being cut here. It also admitted two roles were being sent offshore. In July 2026 the union said 176 more technology jobs were going. CBA said the Indian roles were "separate and unrelated to the proposed changes in Australia".

CBA has company. NAB will cut up to 2,500 roles in the 2027 financial year. The union says about 180 of them are moving to Vietnam and India. NAB says the cuts reflect economic conditions, customer demands, competition and technology. Telstra, the phone company, put up to 650 Australian jobs on the line in February. Some of those roles are moving to a specialist hub in India.

Here is why the logic falls apart

The banks could be right about collaboration. That is the awkward part for them.

Reason one: their own evidence works against them. The leading study on their side comes from Microsoft. Researchers tracked 61,182 Microsoft staff and found firm-wide remote work cut the time people spent collaborating across groups by about 25%. Take that finding seriously and it applies to a team in Sydney working with a team in another country every single day. The second team sits in a different office, in a different time zone, every day of the week. If distance damages teamwork, offshoring is distance as a business model.

Reason two: the mandates fail on their own terms. Two researchers at the University of Pittsburgh studied big American companies that ordered staff back. They found no significant change in profit or share price after the mandates, and a significant drop in job satisfaction. Their conclusion was that managers use the mandates to reassert control and to blame staff for poor results.

Reason three: the mandate thins the team and the cuts finish the job. Amazon ordered staff back five days a week from January 2025, citing collaboration. Reuters reported the policy produced less attrition than Amazon expected. Mass layoffs followed: about 14,000 corporate roles in October 2025 and roughly 16,000 in January 2026. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told staff the mandate was never meant to force attrition. The sequence of events is on the record either way.

The flip side is just as clear. Stanford's Nick Bloom ran a randomised trial with 1,612 staff at Trip.com, a Chinese travel company, and published it in Nature. Two days a week at home cut quit rates by a third, with no difference in productivity or promotions. Trip.com then made hybrid work company policy.

These studies cover American and Chinese companies. Reading them across to Australian banks is my inference. The pattern fits closely enough to be worth saying out loud.

The banks keep the office and move the jobs.

Victorian workers hoping the law would settle it will wait a while. On 10 September the upper house voted 18 to 17 to send the work from home bill to a committee. That pushed it past the November state election. For now, the rules belong to the employer.

What this means for your business

A small business runs at a different scale from a bank. It still has staff watching how the big employers behave, and candidates comparing your offer with theirs.

Name the work that needs a room. Write down which tasks go well face to face, such as onboarding, client workshops and hard conversations, and set office days around them. Staff accept a reason. A quota with a collaboration label on it reads as surveillance.

If work is moving, say so first. CBA's denials ended with job ads pulled and roles admitted at a tribunal. Every policy that bank announces now gets read through that episode. Tell your people what is changing before they find the job ads.

Hire the people the mandates push out. Mark Ma, one of the Pittsburgh researchers, said the mandates handed small companies a rare opening to recruit strong staff. The Trip.com trial shows what two days at home is worth in retention. A small business can offer that this week. The banks have priced it as a pay cut.

Collaboration matters. Ask the banks which team they mean.