For many TikTok employees, the days of working from home are numbered.
The company has told US staffers across several large divisions that they will need to return to the office five days a week next year, two affected workers told Business Insider.
The return-to-office push, which kicks off in September, will affect US employees across a wide set of roles, including staffers who work on advertising sales, marketing, and product, the employees said. A third staffer said they expected that much of TikTok’s US cohort would be back in the office five days a week next year.
TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, set in-office attendance rules by team. The company’s e-commerce division, TikTok Shop, already has a five-day return-to-office requirement that at one point involved tracking the number of hours workers were physically in the office, Business Insider previously reported.
RTO is very much in vogue across corporate America. After easing up on in-office requirements during the pandemic, companies like Dell, JPMorgan, and Amazon have all ramped up in-office mandates over the past couple of years.
TikTok competitor Instagram announced plans to bring US workers back into the office five days a week beginning in February.
“I believe that we are more creative and collaborative when we are together in-person,” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri wrote in a memo explaining the policy.
Other companies like Spotify have been more lenient about RTO. The company’s former HR chief said last year that its work-from-anywhere policy was rooted in the idea that “you can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children.”
The idea of returning to the office full-time has sparked mixed reactions among workers, both inside and outside TikTok. Young employees who started their careers working from home during the pandemic have begun romanticizing the idea of commuting to work in social-media posts, for example. On the flip side, there’s Amazon, which has taken a more aggressive approach to RTO by forcing staffers to relocate to hubs, and has struggled to recruit new hires, Business Insider previously reported.
Some executives view their employees’ attitudes toward RTO as a signal of their alignment with the company.
After AT&T instituted a five-day RTO earlier this year, CEO John Stankey said in August that workers who felt virtual or hybrid work was “essential” would have trouble aligning their priorities with the company and its culture.
TikTok’s RTO plans, set for the end of 2026, could change if the company winds up selling its US business to a new owner next year. Its current owner, ByteDance, is required to sell most of its US assets to comply with a divestment law passed in 2024.
In September, the Trump administration said it was prepared to approve a $14 billion sale of the US business to a buyer consortium that could include Oracle, its executive chairman Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Rupert Murdoch.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
