The data is in: RTO policies don't improve employee performance or company value, but controlling bosses don't care
The data is in: RTO policies don't improve employee performance or company value, but controlling bosses don't care
Researchers studying RTO policies of S&P 500 companies found no improvement in the value of the businesses that brought workers back to the office.
Billionaire CEOs were quick to sing the praises of working from home at the start of the pandemic, calling it the way of the future — but over the last three years, they've slowly changed their tune.
Late last year, Forbes reported that 90% of companies will return to the office in 2024, with 28% threatening to fire workers who don't comply.
But it turns out that the motivations for calling workers back to the office may have less to do with employee productivity or profit margins and everything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back, according to a recent study published by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration from Pitt's Katz Graduate School of Business, who led the study, told BI he started the research hoping to understand why some S&P 500 firms want employees to return to the office while other firms avoid calling them back.
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"One of the most common arguments management suggests is that they want to return to office because employee productivity is low at home, and they believe returns to office would help firms improve performance and ultimately improve the firm's value," Ma told BI. "That's the reason they give — but our results actually do not support these arguments."
I work from home and my boss frequently says he doesn’t mind us working from home but always follows it up by saying he really misses seeing people “sitting in the seats” and “working in the office”. It really is a weird ego trip, being able to visually see people working for you. Actually getting the work done is secondary to the power they feel of seeing their subordinates toiling away.
My boss constantly rode my ass about my coming into the office. I'm a consultant and work on site for various clients. I do a lot of driving that is not reimbursed in any way by my company so, whenever I have a break, I prefer to work from home. But no, my boss has set the expectation that any time I have no on site client work, I needed to be at the company office, a 45-90 minute commute each way (depending on traffic).
If I need to drive into an office every day, I'm going to get paid the most I can for it. She took away one of the main perks of my job, so I had no reason to stick around. So I found a new job that pays 50% more and I'll be letting the company know in my exit interview that's the primary driver for finding new employment. Oh, and the best part? I work from home at least one day a week. My previous employer can get fucked.
Or he could just enjoy being around people. I personally prefer going into an office and having people around. I know that is not the case for everyone though.
This was obvious. Actual work involves focusing. WFH encourages me to focus more. The office is a distracting and annoying place to be.
There's no need to use WFH as an acronym. Can we just stop using acronyms entirely at this point? I know I'm deviating from the point, but fuck acronyms!
I would normally agree with you, acronyms are way over used. But this is an article about working from home and returning to the office. There's nothing vague or unclear about WFH or RTO here in the slightest, and no one is going to confuse those for a different meaning.
It's not an acronym. It's not pronounced "wuffuh" or whatever you're imagining. It's an initialism, and it's far more efficient than fully writing out "work from home."
one does wish you never get into a profession involving laser, or sonar, or scuba. or one where you woukd need to conduct an MRI or CT scan. or at a stock exchange with those stock tickers shortening themselves all over the place.
no malice meant, you see. it's just that your coworkers in such jobs would find interacting with you immensely tedious.
What's even more stupid about return to office is that we know that commuting is a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. So working from home would not only be an improvement in work conditions, sparing millions of individuals hours of wasted commuting time each week, it would also be an easy way to reduce pollution and mitigate global warming.
Laws should be passed that mandate employees can work from home whenever it cannot be demonstrated by the company that being on site is absolutely necessary to do the job.
If you look around, fast food places and Pepsico and everyone price gouging, it's a race to the bottom for a last cash-grab before what appears to be an inevitable recession -- brought on by some of these same conglomerates. Mass layoffs (tech sector over 250k layoffs last year across the board), among inflation just murdering people's wallets. Credit card debt is over 1 trillion now, people are "surviving" off of high interest debt to maintain life at this point, but it's not sustainable at current rates.
The other stupid part is that WFH makes more sense from a business perspective. Having to pay less in office rent and utilities is great for saving on costs.
Not only that, less people driving means less people buying gas, which drives the gas price down as we saw during the pandemic. When the gas price goes down, everything is cheaper. This could be a great way to get a bit of relief on the inflation.
I think it's a bundle of factors why so much of management has turned their backs on WFH the last few years, but ego is certainly one of them.
My personal theory is that work-driven extroverts are typically those in management and executive positions. It's not shocking that they'd be miserable having empty offices. This is especially so for those where the majority of their professional careers have revolved around networking and climbing the ladder by knowing the right people.
Regardless, it's all been extremely frustrating to witness. I'm extroverted at work, but I loathe going into the office more than one or two days a week. I try to keep my social life completely separate from work, but I've known countless people whose primary socializing revolved around their job. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, some job fields just naturally tend to foster more camaraderie than others due to the nature of their work (e.g. odd work hours, extremely demanding work environment, etc). I just despise it when those who desire it and are in a position to force it on other workers do so.
I bet a lot of that 28% is related to banking or otherwise commercial real estate.
but controlling bosses don't care
...have they ever? This is par for the course.
Acting like its surprising that they'll literally ignore the data because it's about control is absurd, this should be the least surprising finding there could be.
My personal theory: boomer bosses are intimidated by new tech and don't trust it.
Employers don't see reduced employee expenses as value. HUH.
I used to work in a place that sank its head office with an increased RTO mandate. Working conditions and pay were already quite bad and the increase in office hours led to turnover rates as high as 95% in some teams.
In the end they had to outsource a lot of their finance roles.
Oh look, a Business Insider article in contrast with the 857 pro-RTO ones they released over the past 2-3 years...
Business Insider is such a terrible publication... Broken clocks and all that though.
Jokes on them, I can work just as unproductively in an office as I can from home!
/severything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back
In my experience, this is more or less the case. At this stage, RTO vs WFH may very well be the dividing line between a company having bad management, and genuinely good jobs. But the determining factor is really people and culture - so choose wisely.
In the few times I've done WFH in my career, the through-line has been working in a "high trust" environment, with people that do not have a dim view of humanity, and do not fleece their customers. The opposite of all that was also true for office-based jobs I worked in between those.
Wasn't this the cover story of Well, Duh! Magazine way back in 2021?
Rto = return to office