Study: 25% of Bosses Hoped Return to Office Mandates Would Make Some Workers Quit

A recent study by software company BambooHR has shed light on the harsh realities of return to office (RTO) mandates, suggesting that at some companies they are merely a back-channel approach to layoffs.

The Register reports that the survey, which included responses from over 1,500 employees, with a third working in HR, has exposed the poorly-executed failure of the return to office movement. One startling revelation from the study is that 25 percent of executives and 20 percent of HR professionals hoped that RTO mandates would lead to staff leaving voluntarily.

While this admission confirms long-held suspicions, the study also found that people did indeed quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies. However, the number of voluntary departures was not enough to satisfy management’s expectations. As a result, 37 percent of respondents in leadership roles believed that their employers had resorted to layoffs in the past 12 months due to insufficient numbers of employees quitting in protest of RTO mandates.

The study suggests that the end result has been the emergence of a different office culture, one that is even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the coronavirus pandemic. Employees, both working remotely and in-person, feel the need to demonstrate productivity, with more than a third believing that being seen socializing and moving around the office is necessary. This intense need for visibility may actually be harming productivity, according to study author and BambooHR’s head of HR, Anita Grantham.

The data also reveals that remote employees and in-office employees both report spending around two hours of every day not working, with those in the office likely spending those ten hours a week trying to appear as busy as possible. Remote workers, on the other hand, feel the need to demonstrate presence by being hyper-available and never going offline, a phenomenon termed the “green status effect.”

Grantham emphasizes that the distrusting and performative cultures some companies are cultivating are detrimental to bottom-line growth. She suggests that while RTO policies can be acceptable, they must consider individual employee needs. The conversation around work modes is crucial for businesses to address and clarify, extending beyond the simplistic notion of RTO.