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- Some companies are stepping up their RTO mandates.
- Amazon and Meta have said you could be fired or dinged in your review for not going to the office.
- Focusing on days in the office misses a chance to tell workers how it could benefit their careers.
Because I said so.
It's the answer every kid hates to hear. There's no rejoinder that won't get you in way worse trouble with a parent or authority figure who just dealt this verbal smackdown.
The fights over RTO have lately taken on a similar end-of-discussion tone. Amazon gave managers the go-ahead to fire workers who don't comply with an in-office requirement three days a week. Meta has taken a similar stance. Google parent Alphabet has said it would factor badge swipes into performance reviews. Wall Street banks have been cracking down as well.
Employers have the right to do it, of course. Yet the flex misses a chance to have a savvier conversation over how being together can benefit workers' careers. And threatening to punish those who don't make it in goes against what we know about human nature: People don't like to be told what to do.
Rather than counting badge swipes, employers considering ratcheting up their RTO demands could do better by focusing on keeping employees engaged and showing how IRL work can foster growth and development.
"Where leadership has fallen down is they have not articulated return to office in a way that is valuable to the employee's career," Chase Garbarino, cofounder and CEO of HqO, a company that provides operating systems for buildings, told Insider.
"It's a major mistake for anybody to come out and say the sweet spot is going to be three and a half days for anyone. I think the opportunity is for us to get off the silly construct of days in office," Garbarino said.
Instead, he said, employers should be thinking about the things workers need to do well each week and when they benefit from doing those things around other people. "If we can make them 10% happier, we retain them for longer and, ultimately, they're more productive when they are at the workplace," he said.
Some workers have been feeling decidedly unhappy over employers' back-to-the-office push. In some cases, people have been quitting over it. And at least a few workers might give up high pay to maintain their WFH world.
Many people are still logging on remotely when they can. Badge-swipe data from Kastle Systems shows that office occupancy rates at its customers in 10 large US metro areas reached 50.3% in mid-October. That's far below pre-pandemic levels.
Paul Knopp, chair and CEO at KPMG US, told Insider the company mandates a hybrid setup but lets leaders decide on the best fit for their teams.
"The only real change in the last 12 to 18 months has been much more engagement with our employees about why being together two to three days a week is really great for their careers, and trying to help our employees understand why we believe it'll lead to enhancement of their skills and talents," he said.
Knopp said being in person isn't about making sure that work gets done. The time the company spent working fully remotely during the depths of the pandemic was proof that people could accomplish what they needed, he said. The key now, Knopp said, is to find a balance between in-office and remote work that helps attract and retain workers while ensuring the company can maintain the type of culture it wants to have.
Balancing being productive vs. being innovative
Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist at software maker Qualtrics, told Insider a consideration for management is the difference between happy workers and innovative workers. He said proponents of remote work will often say they're more productive at home. Granger said while that might be true, "company and group-level performance is not simply the sum of individual-level productivity. That's not how that equation works."
"You could be more productive working from home, but more productive doing what? Are you working on the right things? Are we innovating? Are we collaborating in order to identify what those highest priorities are?" he said.
Granger said both employers and employees tend to succeed when the focus is on bringing people into the office to work together and innovate. "That's where we're seeing the sweet spot of collaboration in the office, really getting focused, head-down work done when you're at home," Granger said. "That's paying off in terms of better job attitudes among employees in typically hybrid environments."
Another consideration for employers is how dialed into their work their people are. "Engaged employees are contagious, just like disengaged employees are," Granger said.
Garbarino said leaders should look past days in the office and focus on what they can do to help their workers develop. That includes leaders sharing their knowledge with others to help them grow.
"There's an opportunity to really use this strategically to gain a leg up by not just kind of following the crowd but being scientific about how you facilitate work at your organization," he said.