In January 2025, JPMorgan told roughly 300,000 employees to be back in the office five days a week. The response wasn’t compliance. Workers flooded the internal board until the company shut off comments, more than 2,000 signed a petition, and some went to the Communications Workers of America to explore unionizing.
That’s not bad luck. That’s physics. When you issue one mandate to everyone, you hand everyone the exact same grievance — and a shared grievance is how a workforce becomes a movement. The mistake wasn’t requiring the office. The mistake was negotiating against a thousand people at once instead of one person at a time.
A blanket mandate is the weakest move in the playbook. It takes a thousand separate situations — different commutes, different homes, different leverage — and fuses them into a single unified opponent. You turned a thousand small negotiations you could win into one big one you probably can’t.
Why You Never Want to Fight the Movement: Divide and Conquer
Collective power comes from one thing: everyone holding the same line. A union, a petition, a mass walkout — they all run on uniformity. The instant every employee has an identical complaint, individual leverage compounds into something far larger than the sum of its parts.
So the question isn’t “how do I win the fight against the group?” The question is “why am I letting there be a group at all?”
This is one of the oldest ideas in negotiation — divide and conquer. But the version that actually works in a workplace you have to live with afterward isn’t the cynical one. It’s not about weakening people. It’s about recognizing that a thousand employees don’t actually share one situation — they share one policy. Replace the single policy with a thousand individual conversations and there’s no longer a unified line to hold. Not because you broke their solidarity, but because there was never really one deal big enough to organize around — only your mandate made it look that way.
The Reframe: Negotiate the Person, Not the Policy
Here’s what this looks like in practice. Instead of “everyone back Monday,” you reopen the deal individually — because every employee’s situation is genuinely different, and that difference is exactly what a blanket policy throws away.
Your best engineer relocated to a low-cost city during the remote years and never wants to come back. That’s not the same negotiation as the mid-career manager who misses the office and would happily return for a faster path to director. Treat them identically and you’ve created two allies with one grievance. Treat them individually and you’ve created two deals — each better for both sides than the mandate would have been.
If you picked C, you understand the move. A is the JPMorgan misstep — it manufactures the unified opponent. B is an ultimatum that just decides who quits for you. D isn’t a strategy; it’s a deferral. Only C keeps the negotiation individual, so there’s never one deal big enough to organize around.
How to Run It
The mechanism is a MESO — Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers — but delivered per person instead of per company. Each employee gets a small menu of paths, all of which solve your actual interest (collaboration, output, cost), each trading something different.
Individualized Paths, Not a Blanket Mandate
The reason this works isn’t that the deals are generous. It’s that there are many of them. Five hundred individualized agreements have no common edge. The relocated engineer’s deal has nothing to do with the office-loving manager’s deal, so the two of them have nothing to stand on together. You didn’t beat the movement. You made sure it never had a reason to exist.
One hard limit: if your workforce is already represented, you cannot route around the bargaining table. California tried a version of this and triggered a good-faith-bargaining complaint and lawsuits the moment its mandate skipped collective bargaining. Divide and conquer here means how you structure individual offers — not a tool for dodging legal obligations you already owe, and not a license to undercut protected collective bargaining.
The Bottom Line
Don’t fight the movement. Prevent it.
A blanket return-to-office mandate is the single most expensive way to get people back, because it’s the one move guaranteed to unify the room against you. The stronger play is to never give the room a reason to unify — reopen the deal one person at a time, offer each of them a menu instead of an ultimatum, and let a thousand individual negotiations replace the one fight you’d lose.
"The fastest way to create a movement is to give everyone the same thing to be angry about."
That’s the real lesson of divide and conquer in a workplace: it isn’t about beating the group. It’s about never forcing people into a group in the first place.
Curious how your negotiation style handles a high-stakes, multi-party standoff — and where it tends to cost you?