Swedish employers tighten office requirements while half the offices studied stay under 40% occupancy

A run of large Swedish employers has tightened office attendance requirements: Volvo Group has mandated full attendance, Scania has communicated five days, Ericsson has required 60% since 2024, mobile operator Tre requires four days, and Tetra Pak in Lund is moving towards five. Against that, a study by KTH found that half the companies examined fail to reach even 40% office occupancy.

Both Scania and the union Unionen say there is no ban on working from home and that flexibility remains in practice. Volvo also faces a physical constraint rather than a cultural one: office space was reduced during the hybrid years, and the buildings cannot absorb everyone returning at once.

Why this matters

A mandate and an occupancy rate are different pieces of information, and a job search that reads only the first will misjudge the second. If you are assessing a Swedish employer that has announced a five-day requirement, the useful question at interview is not whether the policy exists but how it is applied — because the published evidence says these policies and the observed behaviour have come apart.

The Volvo detail is the one to carry into a negotiation. An employer that cut its floorspace during the hybrid years has a hard physical limit on how much of a return it can enforce, regardless of what it announced. Where the constraint is desks rather than management preference, there is usually more room to agree an arrangement than the policy statement implies.

Context

This is a separate development from Volvo Cars closing its Stockholm office, which we covered last week — that was a single site decision at a different company in the Volvo group structure. The Kollega reporting is about a Sweden-wide pattern across several major employers, measured against occupancy data rather than announcements.

The gap it describes matches what national datasets keep showing elsewhere in Europe: Germany’s home-working share has not moved in years, and Brussels has settled at 55%. Employer announcements have been loud, and the aggregate numbers have barely responded.