On 13 August 2026, DNB confirmed that Norway's largest bank is scrapping fixed home office days from October. The current arrangement has stood unchanged since the pandemic: three days in the office, with the option of two home office days per week. From October, that becomes something you agree individually with your manager, not a standing right.
A week later, Nordea's HR director Hanne Hambo Eiken said the bank is considering the same move. "We are in a process where we are considering placing even greater weight on office attendance going forward," she told the Norwegian business paper E24, adding that "we believe in the value of being together." Nordea currently runs the exact same policy DNB is now scrapping.
At Spacefinder, we match tenants and landlords for office space in Oslo, and we will not pretend to be neutral: we believe the office has a value home offices cannot fully replace. But the simplest version of this debate, that office is good and home office is bad for productivity, does not hold up against what the research actually shows. Here is what is really happening, and what we think it means if you lease or let office space.
Not just DNB
DNB and Nordea are the two most talked about examples, but they are far from alone. A member survey by the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) from July 2026, with responses from close to 900 leaders whose employees have the option of working from home, found that 41% now want less home office use in their business. Two years ago, only 18% said the same. NHO's director of working life, Nina Melsom, is careful to note that there is no universal answer: "There is no single answer that fits everyone," she says, pointing to dialogue with employees as the way to reach a good arrangement.
In the finance sector specifically, home office use has actually been stable rather than rising for several years. Finance Norway's own survey from January 2026 found that 81% of firms let employees work from home two days a week, and that none allowed more than three. Close to a third of firms have tightened their rules since 2022, usually citing collaboration, culture and creativity, not productivity.
Not everyone is moving the same direction. Storebrand has chosen to keep its flexible policy, and HR director Tove Selnes has warned against what she calls "parent child rhetoric" in the debate. The picture, then, is not that the entire labour market is turning at once, but that several large, culture defining companies are now tightening their policies at the same time, and that is what makes this autumn different from the ones before it.
What the research actually says
The most overlooked point in this debate is that the research does not support a blanket requirement for full time office attendance. The most cited study is Nick Bloom's randomised trial from Stanford, published in Nature in 2024, in which 1,600 employees at a Chinese travel company were randomly assigned to either two home office days a week or full time office work. The conclusion was that hybrid work did not affect performance reviews over two years, while voluntary turnover fell by a third. Bloom himself has summed up the findings as "a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention."
Norwegian researchers point in the same direction. Anniken Grønstad, associate professor of organisational psychology and leadership at Oslo New University College, told the Norwegian science outlet forskning.no that, in her view, the research "does not support a general conclusion" that everyone should return to the office five days a week, and notes that many of the cultural arguments leaders make are empirical claims that ought to be backed by evidence. Lorena Trevino at STAMI, Norway's National Institute of Occupational Health, has studied nearly 25,000 public sector office employees and found that flexible, self chosen home office use is associated with lower risk of mental health problems, though also with more conflict between work and home life. Her point is that the real question is less about physical presence and more about how the working day is actually organised.
The argument that does have solid research backing is not about productivity, but about networks and learning. A widely cited study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees, published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2021, found that the shift to remote work made internal professional communities less interconnected and more siloed, with less collaboration across groups. That is essentially the argument DNB and Nordea themselves make: not that employees perform worse from home, but that informal knowledge sharing, onboarding new colleagues, and noticing when a colleague is struggling all happen more easily when people actually meet.
Not everyone agrees
The trade union movement is not convinced this is the right medicine. Lise Lyngsnes Randeberg, leader of Akademikerne, a Norwegian confederation of unions for people with higher education, calls it "a risky gamble," pointing to a survey in which two out of three respondents said they would find a job more attractive if it included home office days. She suspects something other than culture is driving the shift: "People assume no one works unless they can see them," she says.
Inside DNB, employee engagement has run high. Morten Bakkelund, a shop steward with the trade union Fagforbundet, believes the unions' input was not fully heard, and stresses that while employees agreed to tightening the rules where the arrangement had been misused, there is a wide gap between the current policy and home office effectively disappearing: "It is wrong if everyone is punished for it," he says. One OsloMet researcher notes that Norway has a stronger trust based leadership culture than, for instance, the United States, where leaders such as Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan have imposed five day office mandates without pretending it is anything other than an order rather than an invitation. That kind of rhetoric is still less accepted in Norway, which is likely part of why both DNB and Nordea are careful to say home office will remain possible by agreement.
What it means for the Oslo office market
For those of us who work with office space every day, it is tempting to read the DNB story as a turning point for demand. The reality is more nuanced. Office vacancy in the Oslo area stood at around 7.6% at the start of 2026, according to DNB Næringsmegling (DNB's commercial real estate brokerage), and that increase is mainly down to weak employment growth and substantial new construction in recent years, not home office use. Even so, UNION Group's head of analysis, Robert Nystad, has described DNB's decision as "convenient for the office leasing market," suggesting the signal it sends to other companies may matter more than the direct effect on space demand.
What does seem to be happening is a stronger "flight to quality." When management actively uses the office as a tool for building culture and getting people back, it becomes more important that the office is actually somewhere people want to go: a central location, good public transport access, enough meeting rooms for the team conversations that are now meant to happen face to face rather than on a screen. Surveys from DNB Næringsmegling suggest that around 8 in 10 companies expect their space needs per employee to stay the same or grow, because the demand for quiet rooms and meeting rooms tends to eat up whatever might in theory be saved by having fewer fixed desks. It is no longer really a question of whether to have an office, but whether that office is set up for the kind of attendance leadership is now asking for.
Our take
We do not think the answer is for every industry and every size of company to copy DNB's model. But we do think DNB is right about one thing: the office is not a line item to cut. It is where culture, onboarding and the difficult conversations actually happen, and that argument holds up far better than any claim about productivity ever has.
If you are one of the many companies now reconsidering your home office policy, the question worth asking is not really "how many days," but "is our office actually set up for what we want to use it for." Do you have enough meeting rooms, and too many fixed desks that rarely get used? Is the office somewhere people actually want to travel to? This is exactly what we help tenants work through every day, and a good starting point is always a needs analysis, where we map out what your business actually needs, not just how many square metres. If you also want to see what an upgraded office might cost, try our office calculator. And if you are ready to see what is actually available right now, every office space for rent in Oslo is gathered in one place.
Sources: E24, DNB, Nordea, NHO (Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise), Finance Norway, Akademikerne, Fagforbundet, Statistics Norway, STAMI, forskning.no, DNB Næringsmegling, UNION Group, Nature (Stanford University), Nature Human Behaviour, and Spacefinder's own market observations.
