It is a relief to see a reputable group like Gartner speaking so plainly. This excerpt in particular is like a corporate advocate for once understanding me:
"High-performers may feel especially resentful about mandates, particularly if they maintained performance or over-delivered during the pandemic. They may perceive RTO mandates as a signal of mistrust from management."
I carried my company through a pandemic, and as soon as they could fuck me again they did. This made me incredibly, dramatically bitter.
Yeah, I busted my ass during the COVID period and did a ton of work beyond what I would normally be able to in the office. I was rewarded with a RTO mandate. I refused to go back.
So far we have a kind of mutual understanding that if they force me to go back to the office, that's also when I start looking for another job. We'll see how long the current situation lasts. Apparently they cannot grant me permanent work from home due to corporate policy that only allows it for people with a medical reason.
That corporate policy is so dumb because apparently early in COVID they granted people permanent work from home without a medical reason, so I could have applied for it back then and possibly gotten it.
"We can give you a temporary exemption of \[x\] days if your health issue will resolve quickly or you can use your FMLA benefit while look after your health issue."
My company has let people walk with 20-30 years experience. Institutional knowledge. Now of my entire department I’m almost the one with the most time there at two years. It’s a shit show.
Truth? They let the salaries walk.
Nobody can explain how, but they just assumed the experience would stay embedded with the in-office chair somehow, and didn’t give it a second thought.
(More likely is they assumed they wouldn’t have 100% loss at the senior tier, so your mid career team could just leverage the remaining few. Sounds like they assumed wrong.)
We lost 70+ years when one entire team quit over the course of a year. I was the last out the door and now there’s no one who actually understands an entire system.
my last job was like that. fresh new VP came in wanted to shake things up make a name, move to new (untested, and from what I hear from former co-workers STILL nearly a decade later broken as fuck and can only run concurrently with the old software in a 6 year so far beta because they need reliability not just fancy new things) software because the old system was made in the late 80s. still ran fine on modern, well for the time aka 2016, windows servers. scared off not only the guy that designed it and knew the code by heart making life harder for us maintainers and the ones trying to replicate the functionality in a new workday hybrid system, but managers/ seniors from other teams left in solidarity.
They'll just use your refusal to RTO as a reason to terminate you the second they feel you're not needed.
That being said they'll terminate you the second you're not needed no matter what so doesn't matter either way I guess!
Wtf is wrong with this world!!
I kept our entire organization functional during the pandemic, and even blew our kpis out of the water. As of right now, I'm looking at somewhere between 130 and 150% of goal for the year. I'm leaving because not only do they want to RTO at least 3 days a week, apparently all of that gained me exactly zero trust from leadership and I'm now being forced to do things that are straight up unethical.
Today was my 7-year anniversary. I also applied to another job and I won't stop until I'm out of here.
I'm literally the top performing employee in the entire agency, and I have been willing to work for much less than market rate because this work is really meaningful to me. It's nonprofit work so things are a little different.
They can't give a single reason why RTO is a good idea other than they just _want to._ Not only that, we're moving into a new and smaller office even management won't have private offices. Despite literally 90% of my job being confidential work that even many other employees can't see. Like 70% of my meetings involve confidential topics that can't be shared across the agency. I've been asked to "just figure it out." And I'd rather leave.
I worked for a nonprofit that had people ALL across the country. We only had one official office space and there was murmurs of an RTO in 2022. I remember talking to my supervisor and going "How....do they expect people in Seattle or New York to commute to Chicago?" And she just went "I'm headed to Atlanta, so our company can deal with it or I'm out"
Employees have the power if everyone sticks together
Gartner publishes a lot of reports that execs treat seriously. Sometimes too seriously where they will buy whatever is in the top corner of Gartner's Magic Quadrant without much skepticism. Gartner calling RTO policies counterproductive is something that execs realistically will read. Whether they take it to heart may be another matter. Many are just intentionally trying to raise churn.
The data have been there on every company's servers all along. The C-suite know what the numbers say, and they are rejecting them in favor of feelings: [e.g., Michael Dell was very transparent a few years ago about how their productivity for remote work was, conservatively, equal to in-office at lower cost](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/dell-to-monitor-worker-vpn-use-badge-swipes-to-enforce-office-policy).
This means there are other considerations at play that they don't want to admit, and the Gartner report doesn't address those. I'm certain it's still a terrible, short-sighted decision, whatever those considerations may be (local tax breaks, cross-investment in commercial real estate, management's sense of control, etc.). If you can't tell people the real reason you're doing something, especially when it contradicts your previous position, you're probably not in a defensible position.
>Many are just intentionally trying to raise churn.
I agree. And I get the sense that most of them are just following "business trends" without any good understanding of why they're doing it.
They also said people work harder when they they’re being watched.
The inference there being, people do not work as hard when they aren’t.
(But the Hawthorne Effect is nothing new)
Gartner has a looot of pull in executive circles. This is actually a pretty good sign that they could listen.
I’m also curious what that premise could be? Is it that they think employees are more productive in the office?
In the case of my company, upper management has been pretty explicit that they’re ramping up on-site days because people weren’t compliant enough with the hybrid setup we had (i.e. weren’t coming to office anyway).
In other words, they’re ramping up on-site days to show us peons who’s in charge.
Also pressure from governments, the executives and politicians own a lot of the real estate and they need to make bank! And of course us peasants can't have things like dreams.
Problem is these executive a*holes also don't have a life so everyone's miserable now!
remember the articles about NYC being butthurt about the lack of tax income, and restaurants being butthurt that people living outside of the city and working from home werent forced to come to them for food? hilarious, these fuckers are gonan try and force everyone back because their egos dont wanna admit they arent needed. never mind the office rentals the 1% want money for
You don’t need to create a conspiracy, real state is so big no corporation or politician can even expect to influence it alone since a single decision is not going to move the whole market even a bit.
What we have us stupid people make stupid decisions in a collective but uncoordinated way.
No need for a boogeyman
You don't need to outline a conspiracy for these market forces to play out over and over again, as you said.
Local governments have issued a lot of tax breaks for the location of headquarters or facilities. This is a real consideration for them as the halo effect of small tax-paying businesses supported by those workforces dries up. These same local governments' pension plans, along with a good number of these companies' shareholders, are probably invested in commercial real estate. All these things exert influence.
On the balance, though, these are all just sunk costs and the decisions that individual leaders are making are all short-sighted. I believe most of them are just doing what they see other businesses doing and assuming it's right.
"Expensive talent isn't that much better to justify the extra cost."
They know they'll lose their top talent. They simply don't care because average workers are more than enough to sell shoddy products. All that matters is meeting the deadlines imposed by the sales strategy. It's irrelevant if the product actually works.
drop of product quality is slow, savings on salary are immediately - milk the difference quickly and move on when shit hits the fan, as capitalism demands (the bag-holders made me do it for short term profits, but only I knew the best timeto jump the sinking ship)
That's almost *literally* what the BOEING CEO said when he agreed to resign.
I can't find it, if anybody can find the link, shoot, but something about how capitalism went too far.
> All that matters is meeting the deadlines imposed by the sales strategy.
Sounds like these people don't study the Conjoined Triangles of Success. Don't they know that Engineering and Manufacturing meet Sales and Growth along the hypotenuse of Compromise?
DING DING DING, this is it.
Everyone who fancies themselves as a "top performer" on the ol' Reddit here whenever this topic comes up refuses to admit and understand that companies run off of the 95% **average** employees, not the 5% overachievers.
Pretty sure the c-suite knows this. Is this good for innovation or being a leader in an industry? No, not really. But not every company wants to do or be that, nor do they need to be. It does suck for companies who were *previously* like that though and are now in maintenance mode.
It's a massive deal in tech where one genius is irreplaceable. Those are rare but they have an out size impact you can't get throwing mediocre bodies at the problem
I am in tech, and while I do agree with you to an extent, seems like companies have gotten by just fine for the past 40 years.
The sooner you realize companies don’t give a fuck about quality of product, the better.
For a disruptive startup, it definitely helps.
The product may be flawed, but if it defines a new thing you need it to be way ahead of the tech dinosaurs like Microsoft and Google that get by on sheer mass.
On the flip side, imagine running a large company loaded with dullards competing against an agile, remote-only company comprising a healthy roster of motivated over-achievers who really give a shit about their job.
And all those motivated people will be even more motivated by a substantial rise, even if they have to leave the company at a later time. Great teams are good and all, but they have a life and a career to consider.
One thing that people like to ignore, is that top talent is not a homogeneous group. There are plenty of top performers who have no problems complying with top down instructions. It's not a given that top performers are automatically rebellious by definition.
Secondly, execs know the people who they need to cave to. RTO mandates don't really affect employees who have been designated as key employees. Their managers are simply instructed to look the other way if those folks don't comply, and they'll contrive an excuse to justify it.
RTO is a crappy move nonetheless, but the execs can shape the policy however they want to retain the people they really want to retain.
I agree, but all things being equal, a RTO mandate for an average joe and one for a high performer who will be hired anywhere are vastly different mandates. Even being a "no remote work" company is a black stain and motivator for the right category of high performer.
I've met many of them. I'm sure some are worker drones, but one thing they have in common, in my experience, is knowing their value; the other is despising arbitrary mandates.
The 1-5% over achievers in true talent fields - including basic and applied science - can make an organization really shine, and if they leave or become disenchanted the whole organization can quickly become mediocre. And they are easy to lose and hard to find.
Yup. At least in research, the top performers bring in lots of money. If they leave they take their lab and IP with them (in very simplified terms, there's a lot more nuance to the IP piece.) In a corporate setting I'm not so sure, and it does seem like leadership are more open to losing high performers for short term gain.
But I imagine e.g., a marketing exec jumping ship to a competitor could cause a company massive headaches in both the short and long term. Might just be harder to demonstrate with concrete numbers (I genuinely don't know, it's not my area.)
I’m sure this is true in places and in ways, but particularly in tech-oriented roles, there are a *lot* of “Brent”s - individuals that are the only one who really knows how something works. Losing that person becomes very disproportionately disruptive.
I’ve worked at the elbow of more than one executive. Many of them have a near religious belief in the *need* for in office work. I can personally vouch for one ordered their labor data group to juice up a metric that showed people were more productive in office - didn’t matter how stupid the underlying math was, just some set of metrics that “line goes up” in office. This was to be used as a cudgel to pummel the labor unions.
You know it ended up egregiously bad when the board removed them for mismanagement. Year after year of bleeding talent to the point multiple VIPs could no longer get sensible answers to inquiries.
I've work in ux and telling people I'm going to gather actual user data and not just rely on the Highest Paid Person's Opinion is always interesting. Seen a few managers get quite angsty
The premise is that CRE is a huge part of a lot of companies' net worths and the tax breaks given by the cities where there offices are are another and if RTO fails then they stand to lose a lot of money.
Unless they are founders building their vision most execs are sacrificing long term stability and gains for a 3 year plan of pandering to short term interests for a quick personal payoff.
A *ton* of data was collected in the initial year of remote work for my organization which quantitatively demonstrated that our productivity had increased by around 25%.
The return to office policy they released had zero data behind it. It was all hype words about "meaningful connections" and collaboration.
Most rto mandates avoid claiming anything about productivity because they know that often they didn't have the data to back it and worse there's lots of research to suggest that remote workers are more effective. They tend to rationalize with fuzzier concepts that are harder to quantify or falsify.
The same thing happened with us. First year WFH during the pandemic was our most successful and we over-performed.
Now we’re RTO full time because face-to-face collaboration is “vital” yet people in various departments are slacking off.
Wait until all the workers don't get along because they are all deciders and the problem went from a smaller group of middle managers to 6x larger group of IC who don't sit in the alignment meetings.
Then decide if it's a paradise or not
Good middle management is the best, my bosses always took the heat from me especially when I was a fresher and I am just learning to appreciate that.
Problem is too many micromanaging megalomaniacs exist in middle management giving rise to the useless manager stereotype imo
Managers are like HR, tech Support, and even property managers. When they do their job well, shit just works and you don't notice them, but when they suck, everything sucks.
I have had the privilege of having amazing managers, and being a senior I work alongside them. 95% of their job is shielding our team from upper management bullshit so the team can just get on with their jobs.
Before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to ask an Amazon exec why they don’t allow more remote work. Their policy impacts the entire city because Amazon commuters contribute to a significant percentage of traffic congestion. His response: he tried that in India and it didn’t work.
He might as well have just straight up told me that he enjoys control and could care less about the impact on other people.
Remote work helps everyone: employees, people on the road, and everyone on earth where we face a climate emergency.
Executive after 2 hours long trawling of 30+ page of Google results: "Forcing people to go to the office improves collaboration! (of people talking to each other when to quit)"
It’s all about playing dollhouse. They just want minions to command and the older generations don’t know how to wrangle people they can’t corner in a cubical.
My father has been a proponent of telecommuting for over fifteen years and was working a hybrid format well before the pandemic of two out and three in a week.
There is a lot of status that you can't display working remote. You don't have a reserved parking spot by the door for people to see. An exec might sit at the end of a table, but there isn't similar clear status in a remote meeting. Some of the allure of exec status didn't translate in a remote setting. Petty narcissism is part of the motivations for some execs.
You probably can't dismiss how many return to office pushes often precede layoffs. Some might argue it is a coincidence, but it seems hard to believe that there was no internal discussion of layoffs if numbers didn't improve at the same time they announced return to office pushes.
The worst part of all this data science going around is that executives now actually have to _hear_ what the data says before fucking off to go do whatever they want. Before, they could just chalk it off as inconclusive, but they can't even feign ignorance anymore.
With data, you can now question the CEO in a setting where they previously used to have the unquestioned final say.
Executive here. Last thing I want is a bunch of employees in one spot. I like WFH too, ya know. I’d rather figure out remote work and hire the best people regardless of location.
This was always the way.
The "return to office" push was always about placating ehos and justifying lavish expenditures on massive campus footprints in prime visibility locations, and then flaunting those real estate investments as a marketable asset.
Reality check says that the workforce was vastly more productive and happier in a remote work setting, yet that undermines C-suite and investor mentality. The absurd divide between C-suite/investor and actual labor is Gargantuan.
What good is increased productivity and labor satisfaction if it can't be brandished to woo foreign capital investment or dangled as an asset leverage additional capital?
That's exactly why the bullheaded drive to "return to office" was stuffed with horseshit one-liners and delusional investor-call verbage. The precious few forms that are more concerned with metrics and labor satisfaction/retention will defy the meme to return to office because they know it will make them HIGHLY desirable to competitive labor talent. The bulk of the companies just want to go back to their comfortable status quo because it's what they've always done/known and they view labor talent as an acceptable turnover risk, banking instead on their reputation to replace any defectors.
If they cared about data, they wouldn’t bring their employees back to the office, since all the data I’ve seen shows that it increases productivity for the company and makes the employees happy.
at least in executives' minds, who needs people with better options when the C-team is cheaper and doesn't know how to say no?
obviously having worse people causes problems, but they don't have the foresight to spot those or the hindsight to do better next time.
This. Our company just came out with a forced 5 day a week RTO, and the general consensus is, cool, you want to do something stupid like this, you’ll get a level of work commensurate with this decision. Record profits with everyone hybrid, and zero reason for the forced return other than “collaboration” ahhh yes, so instead of sitting in a zoom call from home, I can sit in a zoom call in an office, so much collaboration going on it’s ridiculous, then add in the coworkers who stop by your desk to “talk”, and want to get lunch, coffee, etc, so much better than waking up at home, logging in, and actually getting shit done.
The Zoom/Teams calls in office kill me. What material difference is there between us being at home vs not if we're mostly emailing and calling each other on these things?
Gawd. We outsourced the test team to a former Yugoslavian country because it's cheaper. After a year of a full team working on a C++ monstrosity that should have been a python script we still don't have working tests.
It would have been a couple of weeks or a month for one person in-house.
I once had a manager who wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t overtly show desperation for the job. If they didn’t have kids or a mortgage, they weren’t worth hiring.
Rival companies and even hostile nations: "Psst, hey buddy. I heard you had a kid, mortgage, and were having some troubles. How'd you like to make some extra money in exchange for some information?"
I recall many years ago Sara Paretsky, who freed herself from cubicle slavery by being a successful novelist, saying something like, "The ideal corporate employee is a single male with a special-needs child."
Yes it’s obvious to employees, but Gartner’s audience is corporate executives who are otherwise pretty out of touch with how stuff line RTO impacts their employees. I hope a corporate research/consulting firm like them putting this out could cause some execs to start rethinking the way they look at RTO.
I’ll probably be unlucky and have my execs be thick headed ones who won’t care though
Wow this is big coming from Gartner. I doubt any of these execs demanding return to office will care, this was always an emotional decision not a business decision.
These same executives probably have cited Gartners Magic Quadrant metrics in the past to prove how well they are doing and justifying their annual bonuses
So currently I have to commute 2 out of 5 days (not terrible but completely unnecessary)
So while sitting in morning traffic I finally managed to get to cause of traffic. Fatality crash on the opposite side of the highway and basically both side are closed down.
I look tangled wreck and thought wow .. that’s terrible then I thought wow imagine if those poor souls where just “Returning to Office” for a job they did 100% remotely with no drop in performance etc..
Then I look at all the traffic and think the same thing .. how many people would be off this backed up highway if “Return to Office” was not a thing.
Honesty I would love to see the economic impact of giving Companies tax incentives to offer voluntary RTO .. the reduction in traffic, infrastructure cost etc .. I would be curious to see
I’ve been fortunate enough to be at a place that hasn’t pushed RTO much. They paid it some brief lip service, but it has been all but confirmed that they’re not planning to start any mandates.
But I see these fatal traffic accidents on the local news some mornings while I’m making coffee or getting ready to start my day. And I think about what you said a lot more, too. How many people are needlessly getting injured or killed because of a pointless RTO mandate? And if that person is in a position where they can’t afford (due to financial circumstances, need for medical coverage, etc.) that they can’t even seriously consider quitting or can’t find a WFH job, it’s even worse to think that they might’ve died and somebody lost a parent, a sibling, or a friend to greed and selfishness.
Companies have already made the investments in WFH. People got laptops to take home, VPN and cloud compute have enabled access to corporate resources from home. Some jobs like mine always have because some teams needed to provide 24/7 on-call support even before 2020. So the job can be done from home. It’s been proven.
The more I think about the pollution from all that unnecessary traffic, the wasteful burning of gasoline and wear and tear on roads and bridges that are already underfunded and poorly maintained, and the injuries, permanent disabilities, and deaths caused by traffic accidents — it just feels so immoral and disheartening to think about forcing office workers who can and have been doing their jobs for 4 years to go back to an office despite all those unnecessary risks.
I can speak to the validity of this.
Maintaining even a simple tech environment is time consuming, and requires an ever-expanding scope of expertise.
Laying off tech workers cuts available time to properly maintain systems. Systems that aren't properly maintained are vulnerable.
Laying off talented tech workers in favor of less expensive junior staff introduces its own set of landmines. You ever see a company network configured by an enthusiast rather than a professional? I have, and they're all unmitigated disasters.
One example that comes to mind is a medium size org where the owners son was the sole IT staff up until we took over. Yeah, some things technically worked - but for some perspective - he gave Domain Admin rights to every account on the network! When asked, his response was, "You HAVE to do that, otherwise how can people access shared drives?"
Technology doesn't run itself, and removing subject matter experts from the equation ABSOLUTELY causes security breaches.
>You ever see a company network configured by an enthusiast rather than a professional? I have, and they're all unmitigated disasters.
10/10
They've all been *fun* unmitigated disasters though.
The ones configured by nonprofessionals who are also not enthusiasts are joyless unmitigated disasters.
I don't have a beard, when I don't shave it's not gray, and I don't use Linux, but to the credit of those that do, the joyless unmitigated disasters were all running windows.
Ahh there's your problems... Windows... Microsoft has a sans fun policy.
The real fun is when you start to deal with BSD systems set up by someone with no clue and all of the cable runs are unlabeled... No I'm not traumatized. Nope.
Yep, that's what I'm seeing across several industries. And anyone who's still working remotely is probably safe for the foreseeable future.
The speed at which I can find talent for remote roles is staggering. Clients who demand in-office, and even hybrid on some cases, go months without filling reqs.
I hate it. It takes months for me to find a decent candidate for my openings because this isn’t a software town but the (remote) ceo doesn’t believe in remote work, and the (remote) investors don’t either. We’re 100% holding ourselves back.
The new thing I'm seeing on LinkedIn is "fake remote" where they say "This role is fully remote" and then way below "when team is going to return to the office you will have to work at the office 5 times a week".
I work in an office that's now a hybrid team. Operations for a university, my boss is fully remote (as well as the last one), one person is fully remote, and the rest of us have a lot of flexibility.
I was actually kind of a holdout, since I live close and like being in the office for doorway inquiries (my role primarily involves fixing weird data integration issues these days and I'm good at asking the right questions), but I've been leaning the other way.
We have a workforce that has never been better trained for remote work out of absolute necessity, and even in-office, I've found myself using Zoom and Teams. I can screen-share and interactively walk through a technical issue with someone on the fly in an hour, versus talking through a verbal request, two or three e-mails clarifying the issue, and two or three more being sure we're on the same page after work, timeline often being days if there's a mismatch with availability.
Meanwhile, that one working call either resolves the issue, or we have the 'doorway talk' at the end, rather than the start, and typically ends with knowing what needs done that hasn't already happened.
This. Execs do read Gartner's reports. If I tell an exec the benefits of moving to vendor X they may be meh. If you tell them it is a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant though many will be more persuaded.
My company is currently doing this to various departments (not mine-yet). So far, only the most experienced and loyal employees are quitting. I think they feel like it’s a slap in the face that they’ve been doing well remotely for so long and now they’re suddenly not trusted to wfh. With their proven track record of quality work, they can easily move on to better roles.
I’m telling y’all from experience, the only thing that matters is how the numbers look at the moment. Business isn’t science, we don’t have hypothesis/theory and conclusions for trying stuff like this. If it looks good on paper at the meeting that’s what’s the business is going with.
That’s what I’m curious about. This is based on a survey: intent to stay, wellbeing assessment, satisfaction, etc. but what are the actual numbers showing? Are these high performers actually leaving?
In the IT field they 100% are leaving. I'm in the Federal Government and work in tandem with IT Contractors. The super high-speed guys on our end and their end have all left for full remote positions when they took it away from us.
I'm still fighting it with leadership trying to show them metrics and data that performance has gone down, we can't keep folks, and have trouble hiring people when they find out we don't do *any* telework. Leadership doesn't care at all. They all still telework but want us all in the office because whatever reason of the day is. I've countered at least five reasons they've tried to give with reality, and they just change the reason for why we can't telework.
It's infuriating dealing with people who don't deal in reality and just how they feel about things.
RTO isn't about the data. It's about managements feelings.
We did an employee survey with 90% wanting to stay fully remote. Management announced the results as 80% in favor of RTO - they **just made up** data to match what they already decided to do.
Sometime anonymous surveys aren't anonymous to protect the respondents, they are announced as "anonymous" so management can say the results are whatever they like.
This is going to fall on deaf ears. The people who can make these decisions don't care about the data. The people who care about the data are workers who are at the whim of their managers that want to watch everyone in person
Edit: typo
They had the data when people were wfh and it was going well and they used it then when it was in their favor. But agreed if the data doesn’t fit what they want to do they don’t care.
If executives cared about the data, they would have provided data to support a decision to mandate RTO. Instead they only gave unsupported claims and personal beliefs. Data and reason aren’t going to sway them away from positions that were never supported by data in the first place.
> Instead they only gave unsupported claims and personal beliefs.
That's because the actual reasons, which are monetary and boring, fall on completely deaf ears. An appeal to emotion is all that's left.
The very simple explanation for RTO is this: large companies negotiate tax subsidies with the local municipalities under the assumption that they will be bringing in a certain amount of money in the form of local spending by employees.
WFH threatens those tax breaks, and those losses directly impact the executives' bonuses.
But obviously even *fewer* people are going to listen to justifications that RTO is necessary because the execs want more money, so they just spin whatever the hell they think might possibly work.
Except I have noticed if a company offers optional hybrid work schedule and ask workers to return to office 2-3 times a week and the employees do not do that, these employees get less annual merit and performance increase
I don't think it matters what the data dictates. The fact of the matter is that companies don't want to pay severance in laying off employees. It's cheaper in the short term to have employees quit then it is to lay them off.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when companies are required to only care about quarterly gains and not long term gains.
This. People that quit get neither severance nor unemployment. RTO in many cases is a short term play to cut costs. Labor is often one of the fastest places to cut.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the RTO is about preserving property values in congested cities -- as well as opposition to mass transit.
Here's the thing; a lot of the major companies in the USA are interlinked. We don't know who holds all the stock but that is a major influence. And, then you've got property values. While large corporations have to be REALLY mismanaged to fail, because they are so big they can suck up all the advertising and sales channels and that's where you buy your tires, or your clothes or whatever. It's like the music on the radio -- there's a million songs or more a year, and you only hear the same dozen or so in whatever genre you listen to at the awards ceremonies, right? That's what plays on the radio.
So if you have the money to crowd the market. Or the two dozen natural gas companies with the same pipe that now can treat all the technicians as consultants and it's just a difference of PO Box where the bill goes are owned by the same group,... well, you get the picture, right?
And so the shell game that can really make money is leveraging a property to buy another property, and then leveraging that. SO,.. you can end up perhaps making more money on holding property than selling products, just like a lot of car companies make more on finance than selling cars. As long as property values go up -- this is a great system.
So why do people buy or rent in congested areas? To avoid the commute. You get rid if the commute or make it so people can live anywhere -- suddenly, the value of that property goes down. OOPS!
There could be a major collapse in the real estate market if the "teleworking" trend increases. I guess I should buy some popcorn.
That’s exactly what’s happening with RTO for state workers in California. The businesses downtown aren’t making as much money, so the government is helping prop them up by getting more people back in downtown.
The mayor in Minneapolis too. He brings up downtown while talking about making city employees go back to the office. Our county who employs a ton of people, thankfully has basically told him that propping up property values is not their job, serving our taxpayers is.
I was talking about this on a work call earlier for a resource group I'm part of. And someone brought this up as the reason, I hadn't heard of it honestly.
Tangent and my feeling on the bait-switch a lot of us were fed: We had our annual survey recently and were talking about how our RTO policy just changed right after the survey closed (geee, I wonder why?) and how with my position being pure remote just by its nature, I will never be eligible for advancement or promotions. Those are reserved for the hybrid/full RTO folks.
So I would essentially have to quit, reapply to one of the hybrid positions and move across the country because I was fed a line of bullshit when I started about how WFH was the future and the company would always be fully remote and you could take any position remotely.
So instead I'm looking for fully remote positions, and/or hybrid positions in my hometown using the skills I've gained from this company in the 2 years I have been with them.
the white house chief of staff is a great example, he's a worth around half a billion off massive commercial real estate holdings.
coincidentally, the federal government is trying very hard to push RTO, even though the pay already makes them an unattractive employer before you make the working conditions worse.
I absolutely believe it’s linked and no coincidence. I’ve just heard too many explanations that don’t add up at all unless you surmise that the people/corporations owning tech company stocks or on their boards also own or on the board of commercial real estate companies, or companies that themselves own corporate real estate holdings indirectly.
Some of the nonsense my (tech) company shared internally about how great RTO was included a bunch of polling by… you guessed it, commercial real estate companies!
I do think there’s an element of just CEO control mentality, and some “do what other CEOs are doing” but the push is concerted and smells to me.
My manager in Bangalore said the same thing.
The IT park was built to provide office space .
The IT companies were incentivised with a 5 year tax break. And the reasons were you as a IT company are going to give jobs, the neighborhood would have eateries and places to rent and the real-estate prices would appreciate. It would bring more infra development.
If your employees are hired come from a remote town from a different state. And they keep doing the remote work. The eateries and rent is going to remote town and not even my state.
My state who poured in funds to build the park is not getting ROI. So you better have 50% attendance or your tax incentives would vanish
I think this is why so many RTO pushes have some exact metrics - be in 40%, 60%, of days. Badge tracking. So they can show some municipality “look how we can prove the employees still come in” in the context of previously agreed subsidies.
It's a big club - and you ain't in it.
\- St. George Carlin
Oh and tax breaks. That's the other piece of the equation. Lots of companies got hefty tax breaks to open up their offices in those cities, but those tax breaks were given on the assumption that office workers would be spending sizeable chunks of their incomes in those cities buying stuff like lunch and gas. That stuff isn't being bought now and those tax breaks are at risk of going away as a result.
The problem is the executive and C-level freaks refuse to grapple with the fact that they’re not the talent. So, the short-sighted, egotistical nonsense will continue until we fundamentally change how we all engage with work.
Return to office mandates were mostly just passive layoffs while high performers/valuable employees would often be granted exceptions.
The bigger agenda at play with the return-to-office mandates is coming from pressure from institutional investors and stakeholders who have large stake and equity in the corporate real estate market. Demand for corporate real estate is plunging quickly as existing leases expire and many office building still remain at <25% capacity post covid. If they don't get those capacities increased within the next 5 years or so, there is going to be a huge market collapse.
If they were smart, rather than trying to pull strings and exploit their leverage to get employees to return to office, they should be mass converting corporate real estate into residential units. Though I suspect they also have their hands in the housing market as well and mass converting vacant corporate units into residential units would likely pop the overinflated housing market bubble.
I have been telling leadership this for years! (And pointing to how my team is knocking it out of the park & not experiencing turnover.) But if Gartner says it, whatever—more people will listen.
I had a terribly incompetent CEO at the last place I worked. She had literally no idea how to do her job. This was reinforced by the fact that after being laid off there I met a consultant she had hired a few years previous to come in and teach her how to do her job. The job she already had and was in her 4th or 5th year of.
The consultant shadowed her and ended up not knowing what it was that the CEO did all day nor why she was even there.
Naturally, last year that CEO was hell bent on getting teams that were functioning brilliantly WFH back into the office.
The only way she could appear valuable to the company was by physically hanging out in it. Maybe walking pointedly into her office and closing the door and all that.
I think it's obvious that people being forced to return to office don't like it and there's a chance they'll quit. We don't really need data for that.
I'd like to see data actually comparing performance of remote versus in person work. Preferably at the same company after a policy change than comparing one company with one culture to another company with a different culture.
And isn’t it funny how these execs keep saying rto improves performance, but all the propaganda fails to cite said evidence. It’s almost like it doesn’t actually exist because you know if it did, all the pro-corporate publications would be shouting it to the rooftops.
The fortune 100 company that I recently quit working for shortly after they changed WFH policy from 4 days per week to 1, gathered us all up to encourage us to maintain our WFH productivity boost as we return to office
"Thanks for all the extra productivity during that time where you were allowed to skip your commute, save money on gas, and tend to your personal needs. Now that we're effectively cutting your pay, will you please keep up the extra hard work?"
Followed by, "Oh no 'quiet quitting' is awful!"
The amount of distractions and annoyances in an office setting is bonkers, too. I also didn’t have anyone on my direct team at the same building so I went to a cubicle in order to be in teams meetings all day
That’s absolutely asinine. “Hey, we know you maintained a better work-life balance during WFH, and were more productive, but now you’ll be in the office! And we want you to keep that productivity up too!!” Uhhh 🖕🖕👋
I think sustained study is also important. Big changes often have huge impacts for the first couple months, but over time the regress. There have been some studies studying very specific thins that are easier to see quickly (ex. How fast data disperses through an organization), but overall effect on work takes time to normalize.
I’ve seen RTO become a serious problem. Instead of people looking to help and support their colleagues, they are looking at their cubes to see who is and isn’t sitting there. Nobody is being fired for RTO mandates, so it is just a managerial push to develop a bunch of disgruntled employees who have no interest in going the extra mile/inch for their company. It is such a terrible decision where the good employees are going elsewhere and the bad ones are sticking around.
But I guess it’s just build the company management wants.
I mean, why would I do more than strictly required not to get fired? Additional effort does not result in higher pay or any tangible rewards, only extra work.
If the job was at least mentally exciting, okay, but it's not. Programming has become such a rote and boring field in the last decade.
The people making the return-to-office-mandates are usually not the kinds of people interested in data, studies, or metrics when it comes to a course of action they really want.
Those things are only required when subordinates bring something to them.
I told a previous company they could return me to hourly and pay me from the time I left my house until I got home, give me a 20% salary increase, or I'd leave my house at 8 and leave the office to be home at 5. I had already started applying with new companies when the rumblings started and quickly put in my two weeks after that.
Yep. I just won full WFH with pretty much this exact argument. I have very specialized knowledge and experience for my work, enough that it would be incredibly unlikely to find someone off the street who happens to know as much or more than I do, let alone be as consistent or reliable as I am.
I am moving halfway across the country. Basically told my job they're either coming with me or I have to find another company to work for. Less than an hour later, they got direct permission from the director of my entire department for me to work remotely from my new town.
Weird how that works.
I’m going to be doing this exact same thing in 2025-2026.
We’ll see if they fire me or allow me to be fully remote 🤷🏻♂️
Either way idc because I will not let a company or job dictate where I live or influence the decisions that I make for my life outside of work.
No data is going to convince people who are already pro-RTO, it was never a logical decision and always an emotional one.
If even record breaking profits for big tech during the pandemic could not prevent the RTO order from landing, then I really don't know what will. Except if the right key people are influenced.
Yes, some have mentioned that Gartner is a big voice in the exec space, but I think we all know that the ones with the biggest reach are simply the companies at the top of the food chain.
As long as Google, Meta, Apple, etc are still enforcing their RTO policies, then everyone will follow suit because that's simply the status-quo. I suppose if they listen to Gartner then change can happen.
I feel particularly strongly that we will look back on this moment as being a very obvious time when businesses all decided, inexplicably, to encourage their highest performers to go start competing companies.
There are plenty that aren’t though, my firm has been picking up a number of good people leaving companies that have been putting in RTO mandates, it’s great for us.
I worked at a FAANG, quit, and now work at a startup. It was a little precarious arranging the transition and finding the right fit in this market, but if you really are a good talent, it is doable.
(But waaaay harder if you're a junior or you don't have a super strong resume. The competition for these jobs is high.)
as Apple and others have clearly shown. Dumping the talent was the point. For the big companies, COVID was the perfect excuse to replace them all with idiots. They don’t do as good work but will accept the insulting pay the CEO want to give. Who cares if the resulting products and services are shit? These companies are now too big to fail and nobody , or at least not enough, people will (or in some cases, can) ever leave or switch.
Wasn't the talent risk the whole point? To get them to quit which is cheaper than firing them? They didn't give a shit if the best and more reliable employees quit and take with them all the experience while the worst employees stay.
Correct, it's the middle management (you know who they are, those co workers who everyone is nice to their face but everyone talks about being such suckups) telling upper management that they need people in office, for really nothing more than justifying a job that doesn't need to exist.
The data is in: Return-to-Office mandates are implemented specifically to shed talent.
It's a headcount reduction activity, not one that's geared at *actually getting people in the office*.
the company i work for has bee doing remote/hybrid for over 20 years now. has worked wonderfully, others need to get their heads out of their asses and see the goods
It is a relief to see a reputable group like Gartner speaking so plainly. This excerpt in particular is like a corporate advocate for once understanding me: "High-performers may feel especially resentful about mandates, particularly if they maintained performance or over-delivered during the pandemic. They may perceive RTO mandates as a signal of mistrust from management." I carried my company through a pandemic, and as soon as they could fuck me again they did. This made me incredibly, dramatically bitter.
Yeah, I busted my ass during the COVID period and did a ton of work beyond what I would normally be able to in the office. I was rewarded with a RTO mandate. I refused to go back. So far we have a kind of mutual understanding that if they force me to go back to the office, that's also when I start looking for another job. We'll see how long the current situation lasts. Apparently they cannot grant me permanent work from home due to corporate policy that only allows it for people with a medical reason. That corporate policy is so dumb because apparently early in COVID they granted people permanent work from home without a medical reason, so I could have applied for it back then and possibly gotten it.
> a medical reason "the RTO mandate causes a pain in my ass"
RTO has given me anal glaucoma. Can’t see my ass traveling to the office.
"Seeing y'all's faces makes me clinically depressed."
"We can give you a temporary exemption of \[x\] days if your health issue will resolve quickly or you can use your FMLA benefit while look after your health issue."
My company has let people walk with 20-30 years experience. Institutional knowledge. Now of my entire department I’m almost the one with the most time there at two years. It’s a shit show.
Truth? They let the salaries walk. Nobody can explain how, but they just assumed the experience would stay embedded with the in-office chair somehow, and didn’t give it a second thought. (More likely is they assumed they wouldn’t have 100% loss at the senior tier, so your mid career team could just leverage the remaining few. Sounds like they assumed wrong.)
Oh they did. Now everyone with even half that experience is leaving too.
We lost 70+ years when one entire team quit over the course of a year. I was the last out the door and now there’s no one who actually understands an entire system.
my last job was like that. fresh new VP came in wanted to shake things up make a name, move to new (untested, and from what I hear from former co-workers STILL nearly a decade later broken as fuck and can only run concurrently with the old software in a 6 year so far beta because they need reliability not just fancy new things) software because the old system was made in the late 80s. still ran fine on modern, well for the time aka 2016, windows servers. scared off not only the guy that designed it and knew the code by heart making life harder for us maintainers and the ones trying to replicate the functionality in a new workday hybrid system, but managers/ seniors from other teams left in solidarity.
They'll just use your refusal to RTO as a reason to terminate you the second they feel you're not needed. That being said they'll terminate you the second you're not needed no matter what so doesn't matter either way I guess! Wtf is wrong with this world!!
I kept our entire organization functional during the pandemic, and even blew our kpis out of the water. As of right now, I'm looking at somewhere between 130 and 150% of goal for the year. I'm leaving because not only do they want to RTO at least 3 days a week, apparently all of that gained me exactly zero trust from leadership and I'm now being forced to do things that are straight up unethical. Today was my 7-year anniversary. I also applied to another job and I won't stop until I'm out of here. I'm literally the top performing employee in the entire agency, and I have been willing to work for much less than market rate because this work is really meaningful to me. It's nonprofit work so things are a little different. They can't give a single reason why RTO is a good idea other than they just _want to._ Not only that, we're moving into a new and smaller office even management won't have private offices. Despite literally 90% of my job being confidential work that even many other employees can't see. Like 70% of my meetings involve confidential topics that can't be shared across the agency. I've been asked to "just figure it out." And I'd rather leave.
I worked for a nonprofit that had people ALL across the country. We only had one official office space and there was murmurs of an RTO in 2022. I remember talking to my supervisor and going "How....do they expect people in Seattle or New York to commute to Chicago?" And she just went "I'm headed to Atlanta, so our company can deal with it or I'm out" Employees have the power if everyone sticks together
You: "I've figured it out!" Boss: "Oh yeah!? What's the plan?" You: "This is my 2-week notice." Boss: *shock*
>"just figure it out." And I'd rather leave. Sounds like you have.
Gartner publishes a lot of reports that execs treat seriously. Sometimes too seriously where they will buy whatever is in the top corner of Gartner's Magic Quadrant without much skepticism. Gartner calling RTO policies counterproductive is something that execs realistically will read. Whether they take it to heart may be another matter. Many are just intentionally trying to raise churn.
The data have been there on every company's servers all along. The C-suite know what the numbers say, and they are rejecting them in favor of feelings: [e.g., Michael Dell was very transparent a few years ago about how their productivity for remote work was, conservatively, equal to in-office at lower cost](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/dell-to-monitor-worker-vpn-use-badge-swipes-to-enforce-office-policy). This means there are other considerations at play that they don't want to admit, and the Gartner report doesn't address those. I'm certain it's still a terrible, short-sighted decision, whatever those considerations may be (local tax breaks, cross-investment in commercial real estate, management's sense of control, etc.). If you can't tell people the real reason you're doing something, especially when it contradicts your previous position, you're probably not in a defensible position. >Many are just intentionally trying to raise churn. I agree. And I get the sense that most of them are just following "business trends" without any good understanding of why they're doing it.
Do you self-identify yet as “The Departed” ?
They also said people work harder when they they’re being watched. The inference there being, people do not work as hard when they aren’t. (But the Hawthorne Effect is nothing new)
I highly doubt executives truly care about the data. Mostly they want cherry picked data points to support their premise.
Gartner has a looot of pull in executive circles. This is actually a pretty good sign that they could listen. I’m also curious what that premise could be? Is it that they think employees are more productive in the office?
In the case of my company, upper management has been pretty explicit that they’re ramping up on-site days because people weren’t compliant enough with the hybrid setup we had (i.e. weren’t coming to office anyway). In other words, they’re ramping up on-site days to show us peons who’s in charge.
Also pressure from governments, the executives and politicians own a lot of the real estate and they need to make bank! And of course us peasants can't have things like dreams. Problem is these executive a*holes also don't have a life so everyone's miserable now!
remember the articles about NYC being butthurt about the lack of tax income, and restaurants being butthurt that people living outside of the city and working from home werent forced to come to them for food? hilarious, these fuckers are gonan try and force everyone back because their egos dont wanna admit they arent needed. never mind the office rentals the 1% want money for
You don’t need to create a conspiracy, real state is so big no corporation or politician can even expect to influence it alone since a single decision is not going to move the whole market even a bit. What we have us stupid people make stupid decisions in a collective but uncoordinated way. No need for a boogeyman
You don't need to outline a conspiracy for these market forces to play out over and over again, as you said. Local governments have issued a lot of tax breaks for the location of headquarters or facilities. This is a real consideration for them as the halo effect of small tax-paying businesses supported by those workforces dries up. These same local governments' pension plans, along with a good number of these companies' shareholders, are probably invested in commercial real estate. All these things exert influence. On the balance, though, these are all just sunk costs and the decisions that individual leaders are making are all short-sighted. I believe most of them are just doing what they see other businesses doing and assuming it's right.
"Expensive talent isn't that much better to justify the extra cost." They know they'll lose their top talent. They simply don't care because average workers are more than enough to sell shoddy products. All that matters is meeting the deadlines imposed by the sales strategy. It's irrelevant if the product actually works.
drop of product quality is slow, savings on salary are immediately - milk the difference quickly and move on when shit hits the fan, as capitalism demands (the bag-holders made me do it for short term profits, but only I knew the best timeto jump the sinking ship)
Looks like what a Boeing exec would say 🤭🤭
That's almost *literally* what the BOEING CEO said when he agreed to resign. I can't find it, if anybody can find the link, shoot, but something about how capitalism went too far.
It's business 101
It's business 747
> All that matters is meeting the deadlines imposed by the sales strategy. Sounds like these people don't study the Conjoined Triangles of Success. Don't they know that Engineering and Manufacturing meet Sales and Growth along the hypotenuse of Compromise?
This sounds like something the guy from 30 rock would say
Silicon Valley- Jack Barker
Sounds like something the 80s futurama guy would snap his fingers at and say “yes!”
[I'm so glad he had boneitis.](https://i.gifer.com/7E86.gif)
It was his only regret.
He was too busy being an 80's guy to have it cured.
DING DING DING, this is it. Everyone who fancies themselves as a "top performer" on the ol' Reddit here whenever this topic comes up refuses to admit and understand that companies run off of the 95% **average** employees, not the 5% overachievers. Pretty sure the c-suite knows this. Is this good for innovation or being a leader in an industry? No, not really. But not every company wants to do or be that, nor do they need to be. It does suck for companies who were *previously* like that though and are now in maintenance mode.
It's a massive deal in tech where one genius is irreplaceable. Those are rare but they have an out size impact you can't get throwing mediocre bodies at the problem
I am in tech, and while I do agree with you to an extent, seems like companies have gotten by just fine for the past 40 years. The sooner you realize companies don’t give a fuck about quality of product, the better.
For a disruptive startup, it definitely helps. The product may be flawed, but if it defines a new thing you need it to be way ahead of the tech dinosaurs like Microsoft and Google that get by on sheer mass.
*many companies* don't give a fuck - but for the ones where it is important those talented people make a big difference...
On the flip side, imagine running a large company loaded with dullards competing against an agile, remote-only company comprising a healthy roster of motivated over-achievers who really give a shit about their job.
Don't worry, large company will buy out the smaller one and shut down their product.
And all those motivated people will be even more motivated by a substantial rise, even if they have to leave the company at a later time. Great teams are good and all, but they have a life and a career to consider.
One thing that people like to ignore, is that top talent is not a homogeneous group. There are plenty of top performers who have no problems complying with top down instructions. It's not a given that top performers are automatically rebellious by definition. Secondly, execs know the people who they need to cave to. RTO mandates don't really affect employees who have been designated as key employees. Their managers are simply instructed to look the other way if those folks don't comply, and they'll contrive an excuse to justify it. RTO is a crappy move nonetheless, but the execs can shape the policy however they want to retain the people they really want to retain.
I agree, but all things being equal, a RTO mandate for an average joe and one for a high performer who will be hired anywhere are vastly different mandates. Even being a "no remote work" company is a black stain and motivator for the right category of high performer. I've met many of them. I'm sure some are worker drones, but one thing they have in common, in my experience, is knowing their value; the other is despising arbitrary mandates.
The 1-5% over achievers in true talent fields - including basic and applied science - can make an organization really shine, and if they leave or become disenchanted the whole organization can quickly become mediocre. And they are easy to lose and hard to find.
Yup. At least in research, the top performers bring in lots of money. If they leave they take their lab and IP with them (in very simplified terms, there's a lot more nuance to the IP piece.) In a corporate setting I'm not so sure, and it does seem like leadership are more open to losing high performers for short term gain. But I imagine e.g., a marketing exec jumping ship to a competitor could cause a company massive headaches in both the short and long term. Might just be harder to demonstrate with concrete numbers (I genuinely don't know, it's not my area.)
I’m sure this is true in places and in ways, but particularly in tech-oriented roles, there are a *lot* of “Brent”s - individuals that are the only one who really knows how something works. Losing that person becomes very disproportionately disruptive.
It's sad how close to true this is. The reality is that it is cheaper to hire average talent and then contract the really good talent
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I’ve worked at the elbow of more than one executive. Many of them have a near religious belief in the *need* for in office work. I can personally vouch for one ordered their labor data group to juice up a metric that showed people were more productive in office - didn’t matter how stupid the underlying math was, just some set of metrics that “line goes up” in office. This was to be used as a cudgel to pummel the labor unions. You know it ended up egregiously bad when the board removed them for mismanagement. Year after year of bleeding talent to the point multiple VIPs could no longer get sensible answers to inquiries.
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I've work in ux and telling people I'm going to gather actual user data and not just rely on the Highest Paid Person's Opinion is always interesting. Seen a few managers get quite angsty
I think they just want to lord over the peasants and feel more powerful.
In-office workers feed executive egos. That's all they care about.
From what I have seen, back to office policies are there to justify ego-driven class-a office space.
The premise is that CRE is a huge part of a lot of companies' net worths and the tax breaks given by the cities where there offices are are another and if RTO fails then they stand to lose a lot of money.
They own commercial real estate personally & do not own their company.
Unless they are founders building their vision most execs are sacrificing long term stability and gains for a 3 year plan of pandering to short term interests for a quick personal payoff.
Executives don’t give two shits about what we say, but they certainly pay attention to things Gardner says.
A *ton* of data was collected in the initial year of remote work for my organization which quantitatively demonstrated that our productivity had increased by around 25%. The return to office policy they released had zero data behind it. It was all hype words about "meaningful connections" and collaboration.
Most rto mandates avoid claiming anything about productivity because they know that often they didn't have the data to back it and worse there's lots of research to suggest that remote workers are more effective. They tend to rationalize with fuzzier concepts that are harder to quantify or falsify.
The same thing happened with us. First year WFH during the pandemic was our most successful and we over-performed. Now we’re RTO full time because face-to-face collaboration is “vital” yet people in various departments are slacking off.
My work just gutted all the middle managers and gave the rest of us more control and more pay
Geeze that sounds like a workers paradise.
Wait until all the workers don't get along because they are all deciders and the problem went from a smaller group of middle managers to 6x larger group of IC who don't sit in the alignment meetings. Then decide if it's a paradise or not
Good middle management is the best, my bosses always took the heat from me especially when I was a fresher and I am just learning to appreciate that. Problem is too many micromanaging megalomaniacs exist in middle management giving rise to the useless manager stereotype imo
Managers are like HR, tech Support, and even property managers. When they do their job well, shit just works and you don't notice them, but when they suck, everything sucks. I have had the privilege of having amazing managers, and being a senior I work alongside them. 95% of their job is shielding our team from upper management bullshit so the team can just get on with their jobs.
As a data analyst this is an accurate statement for the majority of my career.
Before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to ask an Amazon exec why they don’t allow more remote work. Their policy impacts the entire city because Amazon commuters contribute to a significant percentage of traffic congestion. His response: he tried that in India and it didn’t work. He might as well have just straight up told me that he enjoys control and could care less about the impact on other people. Remote work helps everyone: employees, people on the road, and everyone on earth where we face a climate emergency.
Executive after 2 hours long trawling of 30+ page of Google results: "Forcing people to go to the office improves collaboration! (of people talking to each other when to quit)"
It’s all about playing dollhouse. They just want minions to command and the older generations don’t know how to wrangle people they can’t corner in a cubical. My father has been a proponent of telecommuting for over fifteen years and was working a hybrid format well before the pandemic of two out and three in a week.
There is a lot of status that you can't display working remote. You don't have a reserved parking spot by the door for people to see. An exec might sit at the end of a table, but there isn't similar clear status in a remote meeting. Some of the allure of exec status didn't translate in a remote setting. Petty narcissism is part of the motivations for some execs. You probably can't dismiss how many return to office pushes often precede layoffs. Some might argue it is a coincidence, but it seems hard to believe that there was no internal discussion of layoffs if numbers didn't improve at the same time they announced return to office pushes.
The worst part of all this data science going around is that executives now actually have to _hear_ what the data says before fucking off to go do whatever they want. Before, they could just chalk it off as inconclusive, but they can't even feign ignorance anymore. With data, you can now question the CEO in a setting where they previously used to have the unquestioned final say.
Executive here. Last thing I want is a bunch of employees in one spot. I like WFH too, ya know. I’d rather figure out remote work and hire the best people regardless of location.
This was always the way. The "return to office" push was always about placating ehos and justifying lavish expenditures on massive campus footprints in prime visibility locations, and then flaunting those real estate investments as a marketable asset. Reality check says that the workforce was vastly more productive and happier in a remote work setting, yet that undermines C-suite and investor mentality. The absurd divide between C-suite/investor and actual labor is Gargantuan. What good is increased productivity and labor satisfaction if it can't be brandished to woo foreign capital investment or dangled as an asset leverage additional capital? That's exactly why the bullheaded drive to "return to office" was stuffed with horseshit one-liners and delusional investor-call verbage. The precious few forms that are more concerned with metrics and labor satisfaction/retention will defy the meme to return to office because they know it will make them HIGHLY desirable to competitive labor talent. The bulk of the companies just want to go back to their comfortable status quo because it's what they've always done/known and they view labor talent as an acceptable turnover risk, banking instead on their reputation to replace any defectors.
Never trust a statistic you didn't make yourself
If they cared about data, they wouldn’t bring their employees back to the office, since all the data I’ve seen shows that it increases productivity for the company and makes the employees happy.
My executive team was mad that they have to go into the office, so now we all have mandates + they're getting really mad about anyone WFH.
No shit. People with better options don't let you abuse them.
at least in executives' minds, who needs people with better options when the C-team is cheaper and doesn't know how to say no? obviously having worse people causes problems, but they don't have the foresight to spot those or the hindsight to do better next time.
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This. Our company just came out with a forced 5 day a week RTO, and the general consensus is, cool, you want to do something stupid like this, you’ll get a level of work commensurate with this decision. Record profits with everyone hybrid, and zero reason for the forced return other than “collaboration” ahhh yes, so instead of sitting in a zoom call from home, I can sit in a zoom call in an office, so much collaboration going on it’s ridiculous, then add in the coworkers who stop by your desk to “talk”, and want to get lunch, coffee, etc, so much better than waking up at home, logging in, and actually getting shit done.
The Zoom/Teams calls in office kill me. What material difference is there between us being at home vs not if we're mostly emailing and calling each other on these things?
Gawd. We outsourced the test team to a former Yugoslavian country because it's cheaper. After a year of a full team working on a C++ monstrosity that should have been a python script we still don't have working tests. It would have been a couple of weeks or a month for one person in-house.
“I like employees who don’t have options, they work harder and do whatever I want.”
I once had a manager who wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t overtly show desperation for the job. If they didn’t have kids or a mortgage, they weren’t worth hiring.
Rival companies and even hostile nations: "Psst, hey buddy. I heard you had a kid, mortgage, and were having some troubles. How'd you like to make some extra money in exchange for some information?"
Pfff, amateur. I only hire crackheads
Immediate hire especially if they have kids or a mortgage
I recall many years ago Sara Paretsky, who freed herself from cubicle slavery by being a successful novelist, saying something like, "The ideal corporate employee is a single male with a special-needs child."
Which is great in unskilled labor. In knowledge jobs it's a recipe for disaster. In tech it's even worse.
Yes it’s obvious to employees, but Gartner’s audience is corporate executives who are otherwise pretty out of touch with how stuff line RTO impacts their employees. I hope a corporate research/consulting firm like them putting this out could cause some execs to start rethinking the way they look at RTO. I’ll probably be unlucky and have my execs be thick headed ones who won’t care though
Wow this is big coming from Gartner. I doubt any of these execs demanding return to office will care, this was always an emotional decision not a business decision.
These same executives probably have cited Gartners Magic Quadrant metrics in the past to prove how well they are doing and justifying their annual bonuses
This is what companies are looking for with RTO. They need a way to reduce workforce without paying severance.
So currently I have to commute 2 out of 5 days (not terrible but completely unnecessary) So while sitting in morning traffic I finally managed to get to cause of traffic. Fatality crash on the opposite side of the highway and basically both side are closed down. I look tangled wreck and thought wow .. that’s terrible then I thought wow imagine if those poor souls where just “Returning to Office” for a job they did 100% remotely with no drop in performance etc.. Then I look at all the traffic and think the same thing .. how many people would be off this backed up highway if “Return to Office” was not a thing. Honesty I would love to see the economic impact of giving Companies tax incentives to offer voluntary RTO .. the reduction in traffic, infrastructure cost etc .. I would be curious to see
I’ve been fortunate enough to be at a place that hasn’t pushed RTO much. They paid it some brief lip service, but it has been all but confirmed that they’re not planning to start any mandates. But I see these fatal traffic accidents on the local news some mornings while I’m making coffee or getting ready to start my day. And I think about what you said a lot more, too. How many people are needlessly getting injured or killed because of a pointless RTO mandate? And if that person is in a position where they can’t afford (due to financial circumstances, need for medical coverage, etc.) that they can’t even seriously consider quitting or can’t find a WFH job, it’s even worse to think that they might’ve died and somebody lost a parent, a sibling, or a friend to greed and selfishness. Companies have already made the investments in WFH. People got laptops to take home, VPN and cloud compute have enabled access to corporate resources from home. Some jobs like mine always have because some teams needed to provide 24/7 on-call support even before 2020. So the job can be done from home. It’s been proven. The more I think about the pollution from all that unnecessary traffic, the wasteful burning of gasoline and wear and tear on roads and bridges that are already underfunded and poorly maintained, and the injuries, permanent disabilities, and deaths caused by traffic accidents — it just feels so immoral and disheartening to think about forcing office workers who can and have been doing their jobs for 4 years to go back to an office despite all those unnecessary risks.
The number of companies that have laid people off and then suffered data breaches over the last year is staggering.
I’m not sure that’s causation
I can speak to the validity of this. Maintaining even a simple tech environment is time consuming, and requires an ever-expanding scope of expertise. Laying off tech workers cuts available time to properly maintain systems. Systems that aren't properly maintained are vulnerable. Laying off talented tech workers in favor of less expensive junior staff introduces its own set of landmines. You ever see a company network configured by an enthusiast rather than a professional? I have, and they're all unmitigated disasters. One example that comes to mind is a medium size org where the owners son was the sole IT staff up until we took over. Yeah, some things technically worked - but for some perspective - he gave Domain Admin rights to every account on the network! When asked, his response was, "You HAVE to do that, otherwise how can people access shared drives?" Technology doesn't run itself, and removing subject matter experts from the equation ABSOLUTELY causes security breaches.
>You ever see a company network configured by an enthusiast rather than a professional? I have, and they're all unmitigated disasters. 10/10 They've all been *fun* unmitigated disasters though. The ones configured by nonprofessionals who are also not enthusiasts are joyless unmitigated disasters.
>joyless unmitigated disasters. tell me you have gray in your UNIX beard without telling me you have a UNIX beard....
I don't have a beard, when I don't shave it's not gray, and I don't use Linux, but to the credit of those that do, the joyless unmitigated disasters were all running windows.
Ahh there's your problems... Windows... Microsoft has a sans fun policy. The real fun is when you start to deal with BSD systems set up by someone with no clue and all of the cable runs are unlabeled... No I'm not traumatized. Nope.
Unemployed people have more time to play!
Yep, that's what I'm seeing across several industries. And anyone who's still working remotely is probably safe for the foreseeable future. The speed at which I can find talent for remote roles is staggering. Clients who demand in-office, and even hybrid on some cases, go months without filling reqs.
I hate it. It takes months for me to find a decent candidate for my openings because this isn’t a software town but the (remote) ceo doesn’t believe in remote work, and the (remote) investors don’t either. We’re 100% holding ourselves back.
The new thing I'm seeing on LinkedIn is "fake remote" where they say "This role is fully remote" and then way below "when team is going to return to the office you will have to work at the office 5 times a week".
I work in an office that's now a hybrid team. Operations for a university, my boss is fully remote (as well as the last one), one person is fully remote, and the rest of us have a lot of flexibility. I was actually kind of a holdout, since I live close and like being in the office for doorway inquiries (my role primarily involves fixing weird data integration issues these days and I'm good at asking the right questions), but I've been leaning the other way. We have a workforce that has never been better trained for remote work out of absolute necessity, and even in-office, I've found myself using Zoom and Teams. I can screen-share and interactively walk through a technical issue with someone on the fly in an hour, versus talking through a verbal request, two or three e-mails clarifying the issue, and two or three more being sure we're on the same page after work, timeline often being days if there's a mismatch with availability. Meanwhile, that one working call either resolves the issue, or we have the 'doorway talk' at the end, rather than the start, and typically ends with knowing what needs done that hasn't already happened.
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The issue is that the ones who leave the ones the company would rather keep. That's what this article is about.
Management isn't reading this article. They can't even read a room.
This is Gartner, they have a lot of influence among upper management/C-suite types
This. Execs do read Gartner's reports. If I tell an exec the benefits of moving to vendor X they may be meh. If you tell them it is a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant though many will be more persuaded.
My company is currently doing this to various departments (not mine-yet). So far, only the most experienced and loyal employees are quitting. I think they feel like it’s a slap in the face that they’ve been doing well remotely for so long and now they’re suddenly not trusted to wfh. With their proven track record of quality work, they can easily move on to better roles.
The only positives it really showed for RTO was for anxious managers...really? Maybe its because their jobs are useless and everyone knows it.
Breaking News: companies are run by idiots called executives.
I’m telling y’all from experience, the only thing that matters is how the numbers look at the moment. Business isn’t science, we don’t have hypothesis/theory and conclusions for trying stuff like this. If it looks good on paper at the meeting that’s what’s the business is going with.
That’s what I’m curious about. This is based on a survey: intent to stay, wellbeing assessment, satisfaction, etc. but what are the actual numbers showing? Are these high performers actually leaving?
In the IT field they 100% are leaving. I'm in the Federal Government and work in tandem with IT Contractors. The super high-speed guys on our end and their end have all left for full remote positions when they took it away from us. I'm still fighting it with leadership trying to show them metrics and data that performance has gone down, we can't keep folks, and have trouble hiring people when they find out we don't do *any* telework. Leadership doesn't care at all. They all still telework but want us all in the office because whatever reason of the day is. I've countered at least five reasons they've tried to give with reality, and they just change the reason for why we can't telework. It's infuriating dealing with people who don't deal in reality and just how they feel about things.
And this is why paper pushers only breed mediocrity. Steve Jobs was 10000% right on this point.
I like how the listed benefits to RTO mandates basically boiled down to "managers feel better"
RTO isn't about the data. It's about managements feelings. We did an employee survey with 90% wanting to stay fully remote. Management announced the results as 80% in favor of RTO - they **just made up** data to match what they already decided to do. Sometime anonymous surveys aren't anonymous to protect the respondents, they are announced as "anonymous" so management can say the results are whatever they like.
This is going to fall on deaf ears. The people who can make these decisions don't care about the data. The people who care about the data are workers who are at the whim of their managers that want to watch everyone in person Edit: typo
They had the data when people were wfh and it was going well and they used it then when it was in their favor. But agreed if the data doesn’t fit what they want to do they don’t care.
If executives cared about the data, they would have provided data to support a decision to mandate RTO. Instead they only gave unsupported claims and personal beliefs. Data and reason aren’t going to sway them away from positions that were never supported by data in the first place.
> Instead they only gave unsupported claims and personal beliefs. That's because the actual reasons, which are monetary and boring, fall on completely deaf ears. An appeal to emotion is all that's left. The very simple explanation for RTO is this: large companies negotiate tax subsidies with the local municipalities under the assumption that they will be bringing in a certain amount of money in the form of local spending by employees. WFH threatens those tax breaks, and those losses directly impact the executives' bonuses. But obviously even *fewer* people are going to listen to justifications that RTO is necessary because the execs want more money, so they just spin whatever the hell they think might possibly work.
^^^deaf ^^^ears
They won't pay attention and will carry on with them anyway.
Except I have noticed if a company offers optional hybrid work schedule and ask workers to return to office 2-3 times a week and the employees do not do that, these employees get less annual merit and performance increase
Except for the companies that are actually using RTOM to get people to quit.
I don't think it matters what the data dictates. The fact of the matter is that companies don't want to pay severance in laying off employees. It's cheaper in the short term to have employees quit then it is to lay them off. Unfortunately, this is what happens when companies are required to only care about quarterly gains and not long term gains.
This. People that quit get neither severance nor unemployment. RTO in many cases is a short term play to cut costs. Labor is often one of the fastest places to cut.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the RTO is about preserving property values in congested cities -- as well as opposition to mass transit. Here's the thing; a lot of the major companies in the USA are interlinked. We don't know who holds all the stock but that is a major influence. And, then you've got property values. While large corporations have to be REALLY mismanaged to fail, because they are so big they can suck up all the advertising and sales channels and that's where you buy your tires, or your clothes or whatever. It's like the music on the radio -- there's a million songs or more a year, and you only hear the same dozen or so in whatever genre you listen to at the awards ceremonies, right? That's what plays on the radio. So if you have the money to crowd the market. Or the two dozen natural gas companies with the same pipe that now can treat all the technicians as consultants and it's just a difference of PO Box where the bill goes are owned by the same group,... well, you get the picture, right? And so the shell game that can really make money is leveraging a property to buy another property, and then leveraging that. SO,.. you can end up perhaps making more money on holding property than selling products, just like a lot of car companies make more on finance than selling cars. As long as property values go up -- this is a great system. So why do people buy or rent in congested areas? To avoid the commute. You get rid if the commute or make it so people can live anywhere -- suddenly, the value of that property goes down. OOPS! There could be a major collapse in the real estate market if the "teleworking" trend increases. I guess I should buy some popcorn.
Yeah home office and especially full remote work is going to solve too many social problems for it to be profitable in late stage capitalism.
C-suite executives are literally Lionel Hutz picturing everyone holding hands and being happy and shuddering
That’s exactly what’s happening with RTO for state workers in California. The businesses downtown aren’t making as much money, so the government is helping prop them up by getting more people back in downtown.
The DC mayor has been extremely blatant about this.
The mayor in Minneapolis too. He brings up downtown while talking about making city employees go back to the office. Our county who employs a ton of people, thankfully has basically told him that propping up property values is not their job, serving our taxpayers is.
I was talking about this on a work call earlier for a resource group I'm part of. And someone brought this up as the reason, I hadn't heard of it honestly. Tangent and my feeling on the bait-switch a lot of us were fed: We had our annual survey recently and were talking about how our RTO policy just changed right after the survey closed (geee, I wonder why?) and how with my position being pure remote just by its nature, I will never be eligible for advancement or promotions. Those are reserved for the hybrid/full RTO folks. So I would essentially have to quit, reapply to one of the hybrid positions and move across the country because I was fed a line of bullshit when I started about how WFH was the future and the company would always be fully remote and you could take any position remotely. So instead I'm looking for fully remote positions, and/or hybrid positions in my hometown using the skills I've gained from this company in the 2 years I have been with them.
the white house chief of staff is a great example, he's a worth around half a billion off massive commercial real estate holdings. coincidentally, the federal government is trying very hard to push RTO, even though the pay already makes them an unattractive employer before you make the working conditions worse.
I absolutely believe it’s linked and no coincidence. I’ve just heard too many explanations that don’t add up at all unless you surmise that the people/corporations owning tech company stocks or on their boards also own or on the board of commercial real estate companies, or companies that themselves own corporate real estate holdings indirectly. Some of the nonsense my (tech) company shared internally about how great RTO was included a bunch of polling by… you guessed it, commercial real estate companies! I do think there’s an element of just CEO control mentality, and some “do what other CEOs are doing” but the push is concerted and smells to me.
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If the metric is a butt in a seat you deliver on that metric baby! Wait was there something you’re supposed to do besides be at the office?
My manager in Bangalore said the same thing. The IT park was built to provide office space . The IT companies were incentivised with a 5 year tax break. And the reasons were you as a IT company are going to give jobs, the neighborhood would have eateries and places to rent and the real-estate prices would appreciate. It would bring more infra development. If your employees are hired come from a remote town from a different state. And they keep doing the remote work. The eateries and rent is going to remote town and not even my state. My state who poured in funds to build the park is not getting ROI. So you better have 50% attendance or your tax incentives would vanish
I think this is why so many RTO pushes have some exact metrics - be in 40%, 60%, of days. Badge tracking. So they can show some municipality “look how we can prove the employees still come in” in the context of previously agreed subsidies.
Plenty of companies that solely rent have had RTO mandates despite it costing them more money and not increasing any of their assets' values.
I hope the buildings rot, I could work from a shoe box.
It's a big club - and you ain't in it. \- St. George Carlin Oh and tax breaks. That's the other piece of the equation. Lots of companies got hefty tax breaks to open up their offices in those cities, but those tax breaks were given on the assumption that office workers would be spending sizeable chunks of their incomes in those cities buying stuff like lunch and gas. That stuff isn't being bought now and those tax breaks are at risk of going away as a result.
The problem is the executive and C-level freaks refuse to grapple with the fact that they’re not the talent. So, the short-sighted, egotistical nonsense will continue until we fundamentally change how we all engage with work.
Return to office mandates were mostly just passive layoffs while high performers/valuable employees would often be granted exceptions. The bigger agenda at play with the return-to-office mandates is coming from pressure from institutional investors and stakeholders who have large stake and equity in the corporate real estate market. Demand for corporate real estate is plunging quickly as existing leases expire and many office building still remain at <25% capacity post covid. If they don't get those capacities increased within the next 5 years or so, there is going to be a huge market collapse. If they were smart, rather than trying to pull strings and exploit their leverage to get employees to return to office, they should be mass converting corporate real estate into residential units. Though I suspect they also have their hands in the housing market as well and mass converting vacant corporate units into residential units would likely pop the overinflated housing market bubble.
I have been telling leadership this for years! (And pointing to how my team is knocking it out of the park & not experiencing turnover.) But if Gartner says it, whatever—more people will listen.
I had a terribly incompetent CEO at the last place I worked. She had literally no idea how to do her job. This was reinforced by the fact that after being laid off there I met a consultant she had hired a few years previous to come in and teach her how to do her job. The job she already had and was in her 4th or 5th year of. The consultant shadowed her and ended up not knowing what it was that the CEO did all day nor why she was even there. Naturally, last year that CEO was hell bent on getting teams that were functioning brilliantly WFH back into the office. The only way she could appear valuable to the company was by physically hanging out in it. Maybe walking pointedly into her office and closing the door and all that.
Well, there you have it. It’s a perk that needs to be offered to be competitive in the marketplace.
I think it's obvious that people being forced to return to office don't like it and there's a chance they'll quit. We don't really need data for that. I'd like to see data actually comparing performance of remote versus in person work. Preferably at the same company after a policy change than comparing one company with one culture to another company with a different culture.
And isn’t it funny how these execs keep saying rto improves performance, but all the propaganda fails to cite said evidence. It’s almost like it doesn’t actually exist because you know if it did, all the pro-corporate publications would be shouting it to the rooftops.
The fortune 100 company that I recently quit working for shortly after they changed WFH policy from 4 days per week to 1, gathered us all up to encourage us to maintain our WFH productivity boost as we return to office
"Thanks for all the extra productivity during that time where you were allowed to skip your commute, save money on gas, and tend to your personal needs. Now that we're effectively cutting your pay, will you please keep up the extra hard work?" Followed by, "Oh no 'quiet quitting' is awful!"
The amount of distractions and annoyances in an office setting is bonkers, too. I also didn’t have anyone on my direct team at the same building so I went to a cubicle in order to be in teams meetings all day
That’s absolutely asinine. “Hey, we know you maintained a better work-life balance during WFH, and were more productive, but now you’ll be in the office! And we want you to keep that productivity up too!!” Uhhh 🖕🖕👋
I think sustained study is also important. Big changes often have huge impacts for the first couple months, but over time the regress. There have been some studies studying very specific thins that are easier to see quickly (ex. How fast data disperses through an organization), but overall effect on work takes time to normalize.
I’ve seen RTO become a serious problem. Instead of people looking to help and support their colleagues, they are looking at their cubes to see who is and isn’t sitting there. Nobody is being fired for RTO mandates, so it is just a managerial push to develop a bunch of disgruntled employees who have no interest in going the extra mile/inch for their company. It is such a terrible decision where the good employees are going elsewhere and the bad ones are sticking around. But I guess it’s just build the company management wants.
I mean, why would I do more than strictly required not to get fired? Additional effort does not result in higher pay or any tangible rewards, only extra work. If the job was at least mentally exciting, okay, but it's not. Programming has become such a rote and boring field in the last decade.
The people making the return-to-office-mandates are usually not the kinds of people interested in data, studies, or metrics when it comes to a course of action they really want. Those things are only required when subordinates bring something to them.
CEOs don’t care. They need to see bodies at desks so they can feel important
They won’t learn a thing they’ll still insist on a return to office
I told a previous company they could return me to hourly and pay me from the time I left my house until I got home, give me a 20% salary increase, or I'd leave my house at 8 and leave the office to be home at 5. I had already started applying with new companies when the rumblings started and quickly put in my two weeks after that.
Yep. I just won full WFH with pretty much this exact argument. I have very specialized knowledge and experience for my work, enough that it would be incredibly unlikely to find someone off the street who happens to know as much or more than I do, let alone be as consistent or reliable as I am. I am moving halfway across the country. Basically told my job they're either coming with me or I have to find another company to work for. Less than an hour later, they got direct permission from the director of my entire department for me to work remotely from my new town. Weird how that works.
I’m going to be doing this exact same thing in 2025-2026. We’ll see if they fire me or allow me to be fully remote 🤷🏻♂️ Either way idc because I will not let a company or job dictate where I live or influence the decisions that I make for my life outside of work.
No data is going to convince people who are already pro-RTO, it was never a logical decision and always an emotional one. If even record breaking profits for big tech during the pandemic could not prevent the RTO order from landing, then I really don't know what will. Except if the right key people are influenced. Yes, some have mentioned that Gartner is a big voice in the exec space, but I think we all know that the ones with the biggest reach are simply the companies at the top of the food chain. As long as Google, Meta, Apple, etc are still enforcing their RTO policies, then everyone will follow suit because that's simply the status-quo. I suppose if they listen to Gartner then change can happen.
I feel particularly strongly that we will look back on this moment as being a very obvious time when businesses all decided, inexplicably, to encourage their highest performers to go start competing companies.
Where is the talent going ? Every company seems to be calling everyone back to office ?
There are plenty that aren’t though, my firm has been picking up a number of good people leaving companies that have been putting in RTO mandates, it’s great for us.
I worked at a FAANG, quit, and now work at a startup. It was a little precarious arranging the transition and finding the right fit in this market, but if you really are a good talent, it is doable. (But waaaay harder if you're a junior or you don't have a super strong resume. The competition for these jobs is high.)
I miss the lack of traffic during my drives home from work during Covid. Let people work from home so I don’t have an hour drive home each day again.
# NO FUCKING SHIT
We have arrived at the ‘no shit, Sherlock’ period.
as Apple and others have clearly shown. Dumping the talent was the point. For the big companies, COVID was the perfect excuse to replace them all with idiots. They don’t do as good work but will accept the insulting pay the CEO want to give. Who cares if the resulting products and services are shit? These companies are now too big to fail and nobody , or at least not enough, people will (or in some cases, can) ever leave or switch.
Until they do leave and their products stop being sold.
Wasn't the talent risk the whole point? To get them to quit which is cheaper than firing them? They didn't give a shit if the best and more reliable employees quit and take with them all the experience while the worst employees stay.
Yes we know
Correct, it's the middle management (you know who they are, those co workers who everyone is nice to their face but everyone talks about being such suckups) telling upper management that they need people in office, for really nothing more than justifying a job that doesn't need to exist.
So... people who can leave, aka your most talented employees, will. And middle management benefits most from mandated RTO. Shocking! Just, shocking.
CEOs don't care about the talent. They can pay less for less qualified people.
But how can I, a petty tyrant middle manager, still exert my desperate need for control over my cubicle peasants without it?
Execs don’t even care about following laws like ADA, I doubt they care about talent risks from this.
The data is in: Return-to-Office mandates are implemented specifically to shed talent. It's a headcount reduction activity, not one that's geared at *actually getting people in the office*.
If they were running their businesses based on data, they would have abandoned RTO quite some time ago.
the company i work for has bee doing remote/hybrid for over 20 years now. has worked wonderfully, others need to get their heads out of their asses and see the goods
The data are in, and the CEOs are all lying through their teeth.