Unsurprisingly, employees are almost universally against RTO mandates. One 2024 study from the University of Pittsburgh found that 99 percent of companies that implemented them saw a drop in employee satisfaction. Part of the problem is that people are back to the commutes they avoided during the pandemic. In some cases, these commutes are longer than they used to be. As housing costs increased over the past few years, many people moved away from cities with the expectation that they could continue to work remotely.
Countless reports have also documented how RTO rules negatively impact women in particular. In places where day care is either unaffordable or unavailable, women typically shoulder the consequences. Many mothers choose lower-paying jobs that allow them to work from home so they can juggle child care at the same time. All this has likely contributed to another depressing fact: over the past two years, the gender pay gap has widened for the first time since the 1960s. […]
Why, then, are employers rounding up their workers so insistently, with both stick and carrot? (There are the mandates, of course, and then there are the flashy constructions. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., just cut the ribbon on an extravagant skyscraper in Manhattan. It includes a luxury gym, meditation rooms, and indoor spin studios. Allegedly, the architect consulted wellness guru Deepak Chopra.) Management typically cites productivity as a key reason for bringing workers back into the office. But several studies have shown that hybrid work does not impact productivity. To the contrary, it improves job satisfaction and reduces quit rates.
It may be that the problem is precisely that people are too satisfied with their jobs. Some members of the C-suite have admitted that they implemented RTO mandates to encourage people to quit. RTO mandates offer a way for companies to reduce their staff size without having to pay severance—a tantalizing possibility for employers embattled in the Sisyphean quest to maximize shareholder value.
But the price of playing this mind game with employees is not negligible. For one, management can’t control who will quit, so it’s a rather risky way to reduce the size of a company. You could lose the guy who never does anything, but you could also lose your star player.
The other reason that employers often cite for bringing employees back in-person is “company culture.” But Daisley told me that bosses are “not necessarily being honest about what work was and what we want to go back to.” He recalled that, back in 2019, one of the most common complaints among employers was that workers were sitting around the office with their headphones on. Of course, the headphones that the C-suite were grumbling about from their corner offices were necessary if a worker had any desire to get work done while people around them took calls, crunched chips, and clacked on keyboards. Prior to COVID-19, office space leased per worker had been declining steadily since the 1990s, and employees were increasingly piled on top of each other. If good fences make good neighbours, then no fences presumably make very bad neighbours. All this to say, the “company culture” for which employers are so nostalgic has not existed for a few decades.
Isuspect the real motivation behind RTO mandates has nothing to do with productivity or company culture and everything to do with control. That is what the modern office was designed for, after all.
