Remote workers who’ve been ordered back to the office might suspect the directive is nothing more than a power trip by the boss, and research suggests they’re probably right.
Return-to-office (RTO) mandates are often a control tactic by managers and don’t boost company performance, according to a new research paper from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. What’s more, the mandates appear to make employees less happy with their jobs.
Article content Article content Researchers at the university examined how RTO mandates at 137 S&P 500 companies affected profitability, stock returns and employee job satisfaction. They discovered that companies with poor stock market performance were more likely to implement RTO policies. Managers at such companies were also likely to point the finger at employees for the company’s poor financial showing, seeing it as evidence that working from home lowers productivity. Companies pushing for more days in the office tended to be led by “male and powerful CEOs,” the researchers said, underlining a belief among workers that mandates were being used by leaders to reassert control.
“Our findings are consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use RTO for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance,” the authors said in their paper. “Also, our findings do not support the argument that managers impose mandates because they believe RTO increases firm values.”
Indeed, requiring more days in the office did nothing to improve profitability or boost stock prices, the researchers said. But it did seem to make employees miserable, and more likely to complain about the daily commute, loss of flexibility and erosion in work-life balance, according to reviews on Glassdoor. It also made them less trusting of their managers. “We find significant declines in employees’ overall ratings of overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management and corporate culture after a firm announced an RTO mandate,” the researchers said.
I think it’s more likely a way to get a portion of your employees to resign without having to deal with the socio-econo-political headache of layoffs or give severance packages.
It doesn’t boost productivity, but it may cut payroll.
It absolutely does.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3712680/return-to-office-or-quit-ibm-tells-managers.html
IBM has a history of this kind of stuff - when they need to expand: Remote work schemes, and flexible work hours become more common. When they need to tighten the belt, the first step is a RTO. So long as you are willing some flexibility in the time line, and support employees in the move - it will lead to plenty of people quiting, a few people moving, then you do a small round of layoffs avoiding people who willingly moved closer to the office etc as these are people unlikely to have quick new opertunities and are more stuck with the company/loyal to it.
The Pandemic is not the first time IBM has done something like this, and it won’t be the last.
Now, if we really get into the weeds - a lot of Companies that know this can be pulled off REALLY DO NOT want Remote work/hybrid work schedules to become industry norms, as once they do - these practices for ridding your company of say 1-2% of it’s staff periodically stop being viable and you need to go for a more traditional layoff scheme.
IBM has a history of this kind of stuff
But they never shed the people they’d want: they shed the talent, where those who can’t leave will stay behind.
This is why they can now only exist by buying companies, sucking them dry and moving on, as they slowly offshore all actual work. #byeRedHat
Of course IBM does - who runs them: Engineers? Or Bean Counters?
Man, that “Welcome Back” balloon sign is the most passive aggressive thing I’ve seen in awhile.
Only slightly better than “Don’t forget, you’re here forever”
“Do it for
herthe shareholders”
It’s not complete. The HR decided to censor the rest.
UNWELCOME
WATCH UR BACK
It can still be improved by adding a period to the end
But oof that’s brutal.
Reminds me of these: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/bet-your-dog-s-missing-you-toronto-office-s-return-to-work-posters-spark-controversy-1.5810343
“Bet your dog misses you”
“Miss your sweatpants yet?”
Real estate portfolios
That and middle management needing to justify their existence. They become much less “relevant” without an office to prowl around in.
Don’t forget HR.
If people aren’t in an office, around other people, their aren’t really a lot of opportunities for random nonsense complaints to come out. And if they do, there are email messages, recorded video calls, and so on that can clarify reality far easier - meaning HR’s job is made clearly irrelevant, and clearly demonstrates it is a mop job for a handful of busy bodies that cost the company more in efficiency, than they earn the company after accounting for their wage.
Eh, I think HR is a good thing. Knowing that someone works in HR makes it easy to identify sociopaths in the workplace. If they weren’t all grouped together like that I’d have to figure it out one person at a time.
Media corporations don’t often report on it, but that’s a major contributor. They don’t want to inform people that they’re being forced back to the office because WFH culture is costing the top 0.1%, and the government a trillion dollars per year.
That logic doesn’t work as it’s much cheaper to keep the buildings empty while waiting for the loan to end (businesses rarely own their downtown office) and there’s more profit long term for the owner in converting them to apartments.
Would you rather have a trillion dollars today, or need to wait 10 years and then invest $500M to maybe make a little more several years later? Obviously the trillion dollars isn’t all going to one person, but they’re definitely not all chomping at the bit to completely change their revenue model. Commercial real estate is much easier to manage than residential, for one. Additionally, the big corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, etc. all get massive tax breaks from the cities and states that they’re in, with the contingency that they maintain a minimum occupancy in their headquarters. The reasoning is that they get tens of thousands of people moving through the city every day, paying tolls, parking, sales tax, etc… Those businesses aren’t eager to give up their tax breaks that they spent a billion+ obtaining.
Where in the tax code can I see those tax rebates?
I’m not convinced by this tack. Wouldn’t most businesses prefer to just cash in their now unneeded real estate?
Worse than that, most businesses rent. Being able to downsize the office space is boon for any office-based business. Commercial real estate is an expenditure for them, not an investment.
But they still pulled people back into the offices, because it’s actually about management power tripping.
Most bosses would rather burn money in the name of asserting ownership over someone else.
I gave worked for Fortune 500 companies for 20 years, the C-suite are overly focused on what their peers are doing, everyone just follows trends. When RTO became the thing all the popular kids were doing, everyone else piled on the wagon.
It’s basically high school.
Keep in mind that most commercial real estate leases span several years and can’t just reduce their footprint overnight.
Office space isn’t worth nearly as much if people are working remotely. Much less demand.
Yes, exactly why they should sell now before the prices tumble.
I’m fairly convinced they’re doing it to get people to quit voluntarily, rather than laying them off.
youdontsay.jpg
Companies pushing for more days in the office tended to be led by “male and powerful CEOs,”
I think it’s more of an indication that they’re power-hungry, controlling personality type CEOs. CEOs with actual power don’t need to state “but I am the king!”. They just know they are.
The Government of Canada pushed for RTO for all federal public servants under TBS head Mona Fortier. Let’s not pretend this is a gender thing. It’s class warfare. I’ve heard a lot of men and women upper management parrot the same BS talking points. They’re all scum.
Right, but phrasing it as a gendered issue gets us fighting each other instead of acknowledging it for what it is.
Which is why the article said this …
Companies pushing for more days in the office tended to be led by “male and powerful CEOs,” the researchers said
Right, but of the companies they examined, the majority of CEOs introducing RTO mandates were men. Men with a strong man gimmick, at that.
That’s an observation by the authors, not an assertion.
Our ceo is a woman and she values being around people, so being the boss means we all have to share her worldview.
CEOs are extroverted personality types, and they’ve built their careers off of talking, manipulating, and interacting, so they’re almost always going to be the types of people who can’t understand why someone would want to stay home. Plus they get company cars with company drivers, or company helicopters to pick them up at their mansion every morning, so they don’t understand why commuting sucks for most of us.
Management in general, too, often just sees employees as trying to take from them and the company without giving anything in return.
Because that’s what they try to do to people.
It’s certainly what they try to do to employees.
So, obviously, any time they’re not in the panopticon, they must be cheating the company out of something.
I was hybrid at my last job and I’m full remote at my current one (company is cloud native), I will never again work onsite unless I’m seeing a huge raise for it. The office isn’t worth the time or politics.
company is cloud native
My current employer is private-cloud (what they’d sometimes claim is ‘on prem’ but isnt). One doesn’t have to be ‘cloud-native’ to facilitate 100% remote work.
We just got news today about the future of WFH: The company is selling off more space because no one is using it.
WFH saves money on both rent and utilities. it’s such a no-brainer for businesses as it outsources these costs onto the employee and they still don’t do it.
Cloud native as in “we were founded and began our operations fully remote and via cloud services”. Our company owns no physical assets.
Yeah, no shit
But hey, public servants must go back to the office to please the public that’s jealous and that now complains about being stuck in traffic longer than before the pandemic because if they RTO for two days only, public servants will just use their car instead of taking bad public transit!
I’m very fed up with the “I get treated like shit and so should you” crowd.
If they’re so jealous of public sector workers, then become one. It must be easy right?
I have family that work for the government, the salaries aren’t great and most of their paycheque goes to fees, taxes, and gets put aside to pay for that pension people are so jealous of (gov pensions aren’t just free money). They’ve got fixed sick and vacation amounts with insane fixed times between raises and increases in vacation. And the bureaucracy is next level, if you want a promotion then you have to apply to get into a pool to interview for a higher level role more than a year or from now, maybe. And that’s all after years of working contract to become permanent, and meeting rigid education criteria in the first place.
I work private sector, and if I hadn’t fought my way up by leveraging offers, switching jobs, and demanding promotions, I would still be working low level jobs and I’d make half my salary.
If you’re in the private sector and unhappy, do something about it. The private sector gives you the freedom to do so. Stop tearing down other people pretending if we were all miserable you’d finally be happy.
And those fucking actings that last forever because they don’t want to go through pools… I know some people who have been acting in the same position for 6 years! Technically they could be downgraded from AS7 to AS2 tomorrow morning!
My wife is in that position, but it hasn’t been nearly 6 years.
If that happened in the private sector people would quit.
Fucking this. Society loves punching down, and the one time they punch up they don’t punch up high enough and once again end up with shit on their own faces.
Every time you see a company posting about “green” or “climate-change” initiatives, make sure to drop a comment and ask about their remote work policy lol
