To no one's surprise, RTO policies result in high turn over and hurts productivity. Specifically, high performers are more likely to leave because they are better able to get jobs elsewhere. Another group who tends to leave are women, decreasing diversity.
www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2024/10/06/impact-of-return-to-office-mandates-on-productivity/
As usually, ELTs ignore the data when it tells them they are wrong.
Out of every company I've seen that announced RTO I have not seen 98% of them point to data to justify their decision, whether in public facing or internal comms. It's always just based on the executive teams' vibes.
Good article summing up the various research though.
It's going to increase collaboration whatever that means between me and people in other firms in the vicinity of my location and it's going to make it harder for the people I actually work with to collaborate with me. One reason is that I'll be going to the office during business hours in my time zone but everyone I work with is in a different country.
WFH allowed me to work on that other country's time zone and I was happy with that. I'm not going to accommodate that anymore.
Also the location is near quite a hub where I will interact with a lot of people who compete in this labor market so who knows?
I actually love stories like this because companies will often enforce a RTO policy as a way to be kind of like a stuff layoff to get rid of some dead weight. However, the deadweight kind of knows their deadweight and can’t find work so they keep coming in, but the high performers know they can find new work quickly, so they just leave so these organizations are stuck with the under performers that they were hoping to get rid of layoffs. So yeah hopefully at some point companies learn this lesson but I doubt it. People aren’t great at learning lessons.
Yep. Most of this is simply social control. These “leaders” care more about their class interests than the interests of the businesses they run. Those interests, in the case of RTO include propping up their commercial property portfolios and taking back some of the leverage/market power that employees grabbed after the pandemic.
MIT came up with a study about a year ago that proved RTO are soft terminations and no one listened
They don't because they don't care, and you and an employee should stop caring too
“Exactly as planned” - 👹CEOs 👹 thinking to themselves
You answered your own question, New Orleans. A lot of execs bounce after a few years and are not in it for the long haul. Foresight for only the next 6 months. And after the damage has been done, it will be someone else’s problem
No one cares about productivity. Getting ahead in Corp America is about time and kissing ass
In office minimum 9 hours 5 days tracked by the security door swipes, and Sapience on laptops to monitor if we’re actually working.
Including leadership.
Wow that sucks
It’s a feature not a bug.
They mention Henry Ford as the source of the 5 day work week... but we know his factory and work model were admired by Hitler.
Unions were the source of the 5 day work week. Ford took the idea, among others, as both part of fighting union organizing and because there’s a rational business case for it in manufacturing.
Sunk cost for all those expensive empty downtown offices
Key point missed.. the RTO is part of a larger battle to keep jobs local or national to an extent.
There are some businesses and professionals genuinely oblivious to the larger picture and why RTO really happened too, they were just gleeful about the opportunity to make people's lives hell. Every tree has rotten toxic apples.
Why do you think labour laws and govs went so easy on them?
They know quite well this is about keeping jobs local and they will absolutely throw diversity and labour rights out the nearest window to secure investments in their countries!
This is a very tough storm to ride out in the midst of bigger storms.
This article couldve done a better job of helping people to understand possible reasons why this happened.
Remote working is not fully going away but its not fully coming back either until this storm has concluded and its still very much in the air.
They can't have equality and diversity and family and all the benefits - if there's no jobs to attach benefits to. So some of us are collateral damage in that fight now.
That said, i still won't tolerate any toxic nonsense in an office or spying or paranoid leadership or any of that. Just no.
If that were true, they could have just returned to how it was pre-pandemic.
Why not pay a differential to those willing to return to the office? Similar to what we do for people working those third shifts that no one wants to work.
Because they don’t want to pay more
Turnover only happens if your competitors aren't also doing RTO but they are.
That’s right. It’s an employer’s market and they have control. If/when it turns back to a hot job market I believe you will start to see the brain drain.