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Linked – Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

This seems obvious:

The researchers concluded that the average turnover rates for firms increased by 14 percent after issuing return-to-office policies.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/companies-issuing-rto-mandates-lose-their-best-talent-study/

If you force everyone back to the office when they’ve successfully worked remotely or in a hybrid situation, it will cause a few problems:

  1. Some people who require flexibility will look for something else. The article talks about the higher turnover rate for women. Gee, why could that be the case?
  2. If you create the RTO mandate to reduce headcount without drawing attention to it like a layoff would, you’re still creating the same uncertainty. The remaining employees will have a heavier workload with no pay increase, and the attention you do get for it will not attract top talent. Employee engagement will tank. You’d be better off doing a round of layoffs because…
  3. The employees who have options will leave—the ones who are known entities in your industry and top performers. There are competitors out there just waiting for you to do something stupid like an RTO mandate so they can entice your best employees away. At least if you do a layoff, you can select which employees leave instead of losing many of your best.
  4. One final point, which I had not considered previously but was mentioned in this article about Amazon:

A November study of over 3 million “high-tech and financial” workers at 54 companies on the S&P 500 index (PDF) concluded that RTO mandates could lead to employees doubting leadership’s ability to lead and make decisions. Amazon workers were already questioning the “non-data-driven explanation” provided to them for the RTO policy, as over 500 Amazon employees wrote to Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman in October.

If you don’t have a solid business reason for your policy, the rest of us will question your ability to make any decisions about the company going forward. Employees who have other options will take them when they don’t trust leadership.

Why give them a reason to distrust you?

 

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