# Return To Office, not working as controlling bosses wanted it **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 14, 2025, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858 "2025-07-14T22:06:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Typo\_Knig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/cdc98d/32.png) [@Typo\_Knig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Typo_Knig)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/21 "2025-07-15T01:20:47Z")
I was at Census when Commerce decided to shoehorn another DoC agency into Census HQ. This was 2016-ish. I can’t be the only person who remembers what a cluster mess that was! Ended up with 3 mandatory remote days a week for the govvies, and 2 for us contractors, because even after packing people into conference rooms, there weren’t enough seats. Anyway, RTO is a bad idea for most office roles, as even Jamie Dimon would recognize if he had to sit in a cube 8 hours a day, versus jetting off to give interviews. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/22 "2025-07-15T01:35:38Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > 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… Of what concern is that to the employer of office workers though? > [@Chronos](#): > > 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. Bingo. Back in 2023 when we were losing employees over our RTO policy it was an employee’s market. A lot of companies were simply desperate to hire people and finding it difficult to fill positions. Right now it’s an employers market. > [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > 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. We’ve terminated a few employees for moving to states they weren’t permitted to work from and a few who tried working outside the country. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/23 "2025-07-15T01:38:20Z")
> [@Odesio](#): > > Going back to the office is going to feel like a pay cut. It is a pay cut. Its an extra 5-10 hours a week of commuting. Its not just the additional fuel costs, eating out near work, work clothes, extra car depreciation, etc but thats 5-10 hours a week spent commuting rather than using that time however you want. There is no benefit to RTO for most workers and businesses. Workers are just as productive if not more productive. Businesses save money on overhead. Workers have more free time and more money. Worker satisfaction goes up and turnover goes down. People put less greenhouse gas into the environment, and people who are forced to work in the office (health care workers for example) have less traffic to put up with. The opposition is coming from companies that invested in commercial real estate and companies that are dependent on commercial enterprises located near workplaces. That and governments looking for property taxes from commercial enterprises. Also all the useless middle management trying to justify their jobs. And as others have said, RTO is a way to do a silent layoff to get people to quit so they don’t have to do layoffs and pay severance. ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/24 "2025-07-15T01:45:57Z")
> [@Odesio](#): > > Of what concern is that to the employer of office workers though? Nothing. The business owners (restaurants, bars, coffee shops, etc.) lean on civic leaders, who lean on politicians to “do something” to get more traffic going to where office workers _used_ to be. In the example in the article Sacramento City Council leaned on state reps who leaned on the Governor since it’s all about State workers, but the State Workers Union leaned harder on the Governor to delay the RTO. In this case it has zero to do with productivity or controlling bosses and everything to do with $$. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 10:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/25 "2025-07-15T10:58:57Z")
I’m see a little late to the party on this one, but … > [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > 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. For a company to permit potentially worldwide WFH legally is expensive & intricate. To simply look the other way & pretend the employees are working locally is easy but possibly risky. The bigger companies, and especially those with some non-domestic presence already will have attitude #1. Smaller employers will probably choose Door #2. > [@Ludovic](#): > > 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. Almost certainly. Just as we’ve seen with college admissions, students need to apply to dozens of schools, not 2 or 3. The _applicant_ population isn’t so much bigger, but the _application_ population is 10 or 30x what it used to be. And the individual applicants’ ability to predict their competition and aim accordingly has gone way down. The sutdents are forced to shotgun and the admissions folks are forced to wade through a blizzard of applications. When I was in IT back around the turn of the century there was some remote working, but mostly in-house; then the damn started to break, at least in IT. When my job market expanded from “my metro area, but preferably on my side of town” to the whole USA, suddenly I had a lot more jobs to pick from and a lot more jobs to apply to. Equally, I had a lot more competition for what plum jobs were out there. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/26 "2025-07-15T11:00:08Z")
My thoughts. tldr; it’s a little of everything mentioned above. I speak mainly to tech since that’s the sector I know. 1. The role of management has been slowly eroding due to worker autonomy. The responsibities that remain are ones that can only be done face-to-face - having 1:1 meetings to gauge employee attitude, seeing if they are sitting in their chair, looking at an office space for the “buzz” of collaboration, having no-paper-trail private meetings where they can do their scheming. Managers need RTO because without it, there’s not much to do. 2. Companies are running out of ideas, so they don’t need to hire as much talent. Currently the main idea is “throw AI at everything”, and Ai is currently being seen as a labor-cutting measure. If nobody knows what to build, but they’re sure it should need less workers due to AI, then you can get by with fewer workers. 3. Since companies are hiring less talent, they can afford to put more demands upon them - show up to work 3-5 days a week, go through a ridiculous 4-month, 7-round hiring gauntlet, sell that cushy rural remote-work palace with 4 acres and move back to the city. Ultimately this is about reassertion of power. During and shortly following COVID, the owning/managing class got a taste of what life is like when workers are holding all the cards and can’t be physically observed, and they vowed that nothing like that must EVER happen again. AI especially is emboldening them. Most middle managers are quite stupid, and they’ve bought into the hype that AI will replace some of their most irreplaceable (and hence unmanageable) employees. So we’re going to experience a few years of flailing while they try to make that a reality. It will work somewhat, it will fail quite a bit, but the manager class will spare no effort to in a quest to ensure that workers are thoroughly disciplined by the knowledge that they are powerless and unwanted. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/27 "2025-07-15T13:53:35Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Almost certainly. Just as we’ve seen with college admissions, students need to apply to dozens of schools, not 2 or 3. The _applicant_ population isn’t so much bigger, but the _application_ population is 10 or 30x what it used to be. And the individual applicants’ ability to predict their competition and aim accordingly has gone way down. The sutdents are forced to shotgun and the admissions folks are forced to wade through a blizzard of applications. That sort of thing can go either way, though. When I was looking for a full-time teaching job, I was applying to both middle school and high school positions. Now, the way that teaching licenses work around here is that you can be licensed for K-8, or for 6-12, and so holders of either sort of license can (officially, at least) take middle school jobs. Well, at one middle school I was applying to, I already had some connections to the school, and so I was able to enquire how many people had applied for the position. It was over 90. There are two different ways I could have approached that: I could have said “Well, then, I need to apply to 90 times as many middle school jobs in order to have a good chance of getting one”. But instead, I decided that I would just stop focusing on middle schools at all, and only apply to middle school positions if I had some special connection to the school, and just focus on high school positions, for which there were an order of magnitude fewer serious applicants. > [@LSLGuy](#): > > When I was in IT back around the turn of the century there was some remote working, but mostly in-house; then the damn started to break, at least in IT. You do need at least some IT in-house, though, because sometimes it’s a hardware problem, and sometimes it’s a problem with some aspect of the network such that the only way people can reach you is to walk over and knock on the office door. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/28 "2025-07-15T14:02:44Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > That sort of thing can go either way, though. When I was looking for a full-time teaching job, I was applying to both middle school and high school positions. I have credentials in two hard to find but required fields and master’s degrees for both. It is not hyperbole to say that in the past I would go to job fairs or apply to schools and be the unicorn. If I were to go job hunting now, I would be just another one to throw on the pile of applicants. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/29 "2025-07-15T14:06:44Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Workers have more free time This may be a problem for employers. We don’t get hired to do a certain amount of work in a day, week, year. We are hired to produce (goods or services) at rates demanded by the employer. If we have time to lean, we have time to clean, as the saying goes; if we complete our tasks for the day in 4 hours, the employer wants us to continue to work the remaining 8. That is harder to enforce when employees are remote. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2025, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/30 "2025-07-15T19:12:59Z")
A content creator that absolutely skewers RTO is [Joshua Fluke](https://www.youtube.com/@JoshuaFluke1). ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/31 "2025-07-16T01:49:46Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > 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… And the buggy whip makers wanted Henry Ford to go away. That’s life in a dynamic economy. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/32 "2025-07-16T02:34:03Z")
I want local communities to thrive, not just central business districts. If more people work from home, neighbourhood cafes and shopping strips will rejuvenate. ---
**Author:** ![Mollie\_Magill](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mollie_magill/32/20882_2.png) [@Mollie\_Magill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mollie_Magill)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/33 "2025-07-16T04:42:01Z")
As my local breakfast/lunch place will testify. “Mama’s” did a decent business before covid. She thrived during, as most of us commuters worked from home. Now **Mrs Magill** and I pick up lunch from her at least once a week. (She’s on a hybrid schedule, and corporate closed the office I was working out of.) ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 9:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/34 "2025-07-16T09:34:35Z")
I work from home. If they tried to RTO me I wouldn’t even need to clean out my desk. But they would lose 33 years of experience. Let’s see, I buy all my own office equipment, including my office. I work more hours than I used to because I can work whenever I like - nights, weekends whatever. Some folks at my office do a sort of hybrid thing. I frankly think they want out of their house. I’m not like that at all. I don’t get cabin fever. Our bosses did a wonderful thing. When COVID cleared up, they met with each of us individually and asked “What do you want to do? Work from home, or come into the office?” I used to live 25 miles from my office. Now I’m 120 miles away. Happy workers are hard workers. Enough of the micro managing BS. If you need to micro-manage, you are doing it wrong. ---
**Author:** ![DCnDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dcndc/32/2842_2.png) [@DCnDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DCnDC)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/35 "2025-07-16T09:42:15Z")
As a contractor on a DoD site we’re the only people who are allowed to telework anymore. I only go in to the office two days a week now because there aren’t enough parking passes or spaces for everyone. Which is why we got telework in the first place, even before Covid. ---
**Author:** ![Mollie\_Magill](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mollie_magill/32/20882_2.png) [@Mollie\_Magill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mollie_Magill)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/36 "2025-07-16T13:07:01Z")
There is something to say about a hybrid approach. WFH makes for a happier workforce (you really cannot beat the commute), but you lose what I call “soft training.” That’s when you go to the coffee machine with your coworker, and you casually ask how they solved some issue they had last week. These opportunities do not arise when your coworkers are a hundred miles away and you only talk to their icons on Teams. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/37 "2025-07-16T13:23:16Z")
> [@Mollie\_Magill](#): > > but you lose what I call “soft training.” That’s when you go to the coffee machine with your coworker, and you casually ask how they solved some issue they had last week. These opportunities do not arise when your coworkers are a hundred miles away and you only talk to their icons on Teams Except that didn’t really happen much when I was in the office. What does happen now is, my trainees or younger coworkers can send me an email with a question, or type a chat in Teams, and I can take a few minutes to think about my reply, and provide some decent detail. And those emails or chats are persistent - they can come back and look at them again if they still haven’t quite got it. And they don’t have to wander around looking for me if I’m away from my office. If I’m out to lunch or something, their questions are right there when I get back. I’ve trained people for about 20 years now, and this is the best on-the-job methodology I’ve ever had. ---
**Author:** ![OldOlds](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a3d4f5/32.png) [@OldOlds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldOlds)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/38 "2025-07-16T13:25:32Z")
One thing that I have seen, but doesn’t get talked about much, is resentment. There are jobs that cannot be done from home. Like chemist, or manufacturing. And when some employees have to come in while others at the same level don’t, it’s both disheartening and lonely for those who have to come in. And when the entry level manufacturing guy has to come in, while a whole bunch of higher level managers and accountant and marketing don’t, the manufacturing guy has a tendency to see that as unfair. We can debate whether any of this is reasonable, but it happens, and it can’t be good for the company overall. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/39 "2025-07-16T13:33:11Z")
Eh, that’s just “different jobs are different”. Every job has its benefits and its drawbacks, and sometimes those are the same things, depending on the person. We’re starting to see some new differences between jobs that weren’t relevant before, so there’s bound to be some adjustment period, but I don’t think it’s anything fundamentally new. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2025, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858/40 "2025-07-16T14:05:36Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > Let’s see, I buy all my own office equipment, including my office. I work more hours than I used to because I can work whenever I like - nights, weekends whatever. It seems wrong to me that you are providing the WFH hardware. That should be provided by the employer. And that’s what my employer does; we give people monitors, docking stations, keyboards, mice, etc. And yes, when you work from home, you’re paying for the office space. That is a sneaky way for the employers to offload the cost onto the employees. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/return-to-office-not-working-as-controlling-bosses-wanted-it/1020858.md?page=3)