Leaders are perhaps experiencing more resistance than they had anticipated.
Amazon is perhaps the most documented example of how ugly the RTO battle can get: Around 30,000 employees signed a petition protesting the company’s in-office mandate, and more than 1,800 pledged to walk out from their jobs to take a stand.
The tech giant is still complaining that workers are dodging the three-day in-office mandate, over a year after it was announced.
Because companies are planning to increase hiring soon. The fed is going to cut the interest rate, spurring growth. RTO was just about making employees quit to avoid severance payouts and other layoff perks back when the economy was more slumped.
What about “we have this massive office and only 3 people use it” and “we want to micro manage our employees”
There’s some of that. I know companies in my city were given tax breaks for hosting their office building there. The theory is, the business brings more people into the area who will be spending money on lunch/happy hour/gas/etc. The tax income of that is more than the tax benefit they offer the company.
Well, people stop coming to the office, and their tax benefit of the employees being in the city dries up. The city was threatening the companies tax benefit if the people didn’t come back, and thus, RTO (in my city, anyway).
Why would they make employees quit when they are just going to hire again? Weeding out the job hoppers?
Because a lot of CEOs these days only care about quarterly reports. When interest rates went up, companies cost to do business also went up, so to keep the red profit line going up, they had to cut costs somewhere. Labor makes up most of the expenses so layoffs and forced RTO happened.
These CEOs don’t care that they lose years of experience when employees leave. And by the time the lack of experience catches up to the companies shitting themselves, the CEOs hope to have moved on to something else with their massive stock rewards for “increasing shareholder value”. Even the Boeing CEO who wasn’t lucky enough to leave before shit hit the fan is going to get a golden parachute. So really no downside for them.
