Return To Office, not working as controlling bosses wanted it

In My Humble Opinion
1

Late last year, Forbes reported that 90% of companies will return to the office in 2024, with 28% threatening to fire workers who don’t comply.

But it turns out that the motivations for calling workers back to the office may have less to do with employee productivity or profit margins and everything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back, according to a recent study published by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.

That report was from 2024. How it is going now in the days many big companies thought that the winds had changed in favor of the narcissistic bosses that believed RTO was the panacea for their problems?

Not so good.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-data-shows-workers-are-mostly-ignoring-return-to-office-orders/91202144

Since the pandemic, Reddit and other forums have been full of outraged employees calling their bosses various profane and unpleasant things for suggesting they give up their remote setups.

But these are different times. Many companies are pursuing increased efficiency, including through large-scale layoffs. Like Dimon, bosses seem all too happy to let go of any employee who might defy their RTO orders.

Which might make you think that employees are finally, begrudgingly heeding the back-to-the-office call. Not so, according to Nick Bloom, the Stanford economist behind the 2022 study and a long-time leader in research into hybrid and remote work.

Employees are still ignoring RTO orders

In 2023, Bloom shared real estate and transit data suggesting that most businesses were settling at three days in the office and two at home. “The return-to-office push seems to have died,” he tweeted. “The RTO wars were over. Hybrid won.”

The rhetoric from bosses may have heated up since then, but according to Bloom’s latest data, the numbers haven’t really budged.

“While policy requirements for office attendance have jumped 10% since early 2024, actual attendance has barely moved, increasing less than 2% during the same time period,” reports Time.

I lost my State job recently thanks in large part to the Federal funding cuts, and one thing I noticed is that the job boards I check online have hundreds of people applying for remote jobs, sometimes hundreds of applications are already in just after a few hours after a remote job is posted, local jobs that I’m applying too are not so popular.

What the data is reporting:

Geographic Arbitrage Factor:
Remote-first companies access top talent from lower-cost markets while maintaining competitive salaries. RTO companies pay premium local wages for smaller talent pools.

The Numbers:
Remote workers report higher satisfaction
Location flexibility fills positions 40% faster
Geographic diversity improves problem-solving

Strategic Implications:
In markets where 25% fewer entry-level positions exist and college graduates face record unemployment, restricting talent pools through location requirements compounds hiring challenges.

Winning Strategy: Focus on results, not presence. Companies thriving evolved management practices instead of reverting to pre-2020 models.

What do you guys think? It looks as if the RTO is still there, but not working as expected, and IMHO it is looking as a mistake for large corporations that are leaving a lot of talent out.

2

I think for many companies RTO was a way to get employees to quit in a way it’s not the companies fault and that way, they don’t have to pay severence or unemployment.

3

I also did think that, maybe the bosses wanted that result like Elon got with Xitter, but as Time reported in a link in the quotes:

The most revealing finding? While policy requirements for office attendance have jumped 10% since early 2024, actual attendance has barely moved, increasing less than 2% during the same period based on data collected by Stanford Professor Nick Bloom and his team. This growing compliance gap signals something fundamental: employees are quietly rejecting mandates they find disconnected from both their needs and their demonstrated productivity.

That, or many bosses are quietly chickening out..

4

I think some employers re-thought RTO policies once they realized that they didn’t have sufficient office space for everyone. Remember that one advantage of WFH is the need for less office space at the expense of using people’s homes instead.

5

I work under the Department of Commerce umbrella and there simply isn’t anywhere to put all of our remote workers, at least not yet. The lease for a satellite building was allowed to expire due to not enough in-person workers to justify keeping it open; I don’t know if any buildings in our headquarters complex also closed for the same reason.

Not only are circumstances created by previous administrations blocking – or at least significantly delaying – RTO, our union has taken an active interest in not disrupting anyone’s lives.

6

As an employer I can confirm this. We don’t require anyone to come in to the office (except reception) and our overhead has dropped noticably. Not only do we need less space, but we are getting slightly less per foot rate due to overall vacancies. Employees are happy, we’re happy. Some environmental advantages as well.

7

And some employees moved far away from their workplaces, even to different states. So RTO isn’t really possible for some.

8

In some cases, the RTO motivation is not from the office itself, but from the area the office is located - downtown wants it workers back…

9

We have two employees who moved out of the country. Those are the only two that really aren’t working out, unfortunately.

10

This looks to me like the author got it backwards. College graduates facing record unemployment means that the market currently favors the employers, not the employees, so companies are free to restrict talent pools if they like.

Requiring RTO is probably still a bad idea. But the market conditions make it less bad, not more.

11

I’m a little surprised that was allowed. Someone asked in an all hands meeting at my employer and they said that we’re not set up for employing people outside the country.

12

Yeah, but if that last line was so, then one should see more than the less than 2% growth of RTO.

13

Last time we had an RTO was in 2023, and management had to walk that back because we were losing employees at an alarming rate. Later this summer, I’ll need to start coming into the office three times a week. Many employees at my company are super salty about it, and we’re going to lose people, but I think it’s by design. Based on the reports my managers have been asking me to generate about our work population, I’d say we’re in for a round of layoffs in early 2026.

I think working from home really changed expectations of the workforce. I was indifferent to working from home prior to Covid, but even with some of the drawbacks, working from home has prove immensely beneficial. I spend less money in clothing, commuting, and food and I have an extra 1.5 hours to myself each day because I don’t have to drive to and from work. Going back to the office is going to feel like a pay cut.

14

I agree that the conditions facing employees does not compound the problems of RTO for the employer. But it’s possible that the employment market conditions have shifted in a negative-sum rather than zero-sum way. Some people in employment-related subreddits think that we’re in a vicious cycle when employees know that they have to apply for more than an order of magnitude more jobs than they previously had to. So, even employers who want to hire people still have to wade through thousands of applications.

And, here is the kicker for employers. It would be good if they had thousands of enthusiastic, highly-qualified applicants to choose from. But in order to stand a chance, the prospective employees have to lower their own standards of when not to apply, resulting in those thousands of applications having a lot of chaff with the wheat.

15

Yeah, it’s probably not kosher. We deposit their paycheck into their domestic account. Maybe officially they’re in Tacoma or Boise.

16

Isn’t the country where they live going to want payroll taxes paid?

17

I depends on the country they moved to.

Bermuda, Monaco, the Bahamas, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are four countries that don’t have personal income taxes.

18

There are countries that have remote worker visas specifically for these kinds of arrangements.

19

My son spends a month here every year and I don’t think his employer has any idea he is out of the US. He should probably pay Canadian taxes on his earnings during that month, but no one knows he is working here.

Getting back to the OP, my son-in-law works for Amazon who has mandated BTO, but really hasn’t enforced it and isn’t really set up for everyone to come in. He is now actively searching for another job.

20

Some were hired in different states because they were told they didn’t have to come to the office. Now their companies are telling them they have to move because of RTO.