5 Reasons for RTO Mandates

[canyonwalker]

I posted yesterday about 5-day-a-week RTO mandates such as the one Amazon announced a few weeks ago. When a big change is being made it's appropriate to ask "Why?" Why is this change being made? And more specifically, what is the value the businesses are looking to achieve? People all over industry, from CEOs to business/HR consultants to ordinary workers, have ideas about this. Here are Five Things:

• Sunk Cost Fallacy. "We're paying for all this office real estate," this argument imagines a CEO fuming, "We should have people occupying it." This is an example of sunk cost because the office space is something the company has already purchased or entered into a long term contract to pay for. And it's arguably a sunk cost fallacy because occupying the office space doesn't necessarily save the company any money or create any new value. "But wouldn't business CEOs, through their education and wisdom, being able to avoid trivial fallacies like the sunk cost fallacy?" Haha, no. One thing I've learned about business leaders is that their reasoning is often like anyone else's. They make decisions emotionally and then rationalize by selecting whichever data fits.


• Weak Managers. "How do you ensure remote workers are actually working?" has been a challenge of managing remote work for years. A lot of leaders still have a factory-work mindset that workers need to be at their stations visibly performing their tasks otherwise they're goofing off. That's still true for a variety of professions from air traffic controllers to welders to fast food workers, but it's less and less true within the burgeoning world of desk jobs. Yet that remains the go-to for weak managers who've failed to understand and embrace the myriad other ways to monitor worker engagement and worker productivity in an increasingly computerized work world.


• Productivity. Ah, now this is one explicitly cited by business leaders for their RTO mandates. Workers are more productive in the office. Yet that claim rings hollow for so many of us workers who worked through the safer-at-home phase of the pandemic, when those same leaders crowed about how efficient their businesses were with widespread remote work.


• Culture and Professional Development. This is another one that leaders themselves have explicitly cited as a driver for RTO policies. It's valuable for new hires and early-career employees, especially, they've said, to work in the office alongside more senior colleagues to develop critical skills. There are two challenges with that. One, there are elements of both carrot and stick. The carrot is development and advancement. The stick is when leaders turn that around and tell employees, "If you want to work remotely, forget about being promoted." Which they have told employees at some companies. The second challenge is that the notion of professional development for lower level employees depends on the higher level employees/leaders being in the office, too. And companies have spent years already hiring talent wherever they can find it, especially when & where they can find it for vastly less money. It's transparent nonsense to tell employees they have to report to offices in, say, San Francisco and Seattle, for professional development when their Sr. Dir. is in Texas, VP is in Ohio, and half their colleagues are in India.


• Stealth Layoff. It's widely suspected among workers in industry, and not a few industry watchers, that tough RTO policies spurring some number of employees to quit is a feature, not a bug, of the plan. Tech companies have been downsizing for over a year now. Attrition is cheaper than layoffs. If companies can get employees to quit on their own, there's no bad PR from having to file WARN Act notices, there's no risk of legal action from laid off employees alleging discrimination on the basis of age, gender, family status, etc., and there's no cost of severance packages. The challenge to companies in downsizing attrition is that it's often the best employees who leave, as their desirable education, skills, and accomplishments make it easiest for them to find new jobs quickly.