Remote workers who’ve been ordered back to the office might suspect the directive is nothing more than a power trip by the boss, and research suggests they’re probably right.
Return-to-office (RTO) mandates are often a control tactic by managers and don’t boost company performance, according to a new research paper from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. What’s more, the mandates appear to make employees less happy with their jobs.
Article content Article content Researchers at the university examined how RTO mandates at 137 S&P 500 companies affected profitability, stock returns and employee job satisfaction. They discovered that companies with poor stock market performance were more likely to implement RTO policies. Managers at such companies were also likely to point the finger at employees for the company’s poor financial showing, seeing it as evidence that working from home lowers productivity. Companies pushing for more days in the office tended to be led by “male and powerful CEOs,” the researchers said, underlining a belief among workers that mandates were being used by leaders to reassert control.
“Our findings are consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use RTO for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance,” the authors said in their paper. “Also, our findings do not support the argument that managers impose mandates because they believe RTO increases firm values.”
Indeed, requiring more days in the office did nothing to improve profitability or boost stock prices, the researchers said. But it did seem to make employees miserable, and more likely to complain about the daily commute, loss of flexibility and erosion in work-life balance, according to reviews on Glassdoor. It also made them less trusting of their managers. “We find significant declines in employees’ overall ratings of overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management and corporate culture after a firm announced an RTO mandate,” the researchers said.
Real estate portfolios
That and middle management needing to justify their existence. They become much less “relevant” without an office to prowl around in.
Don’t forget HR.
If people aren’t in an office, around other people, their aren’t really a lot of opportunities for random nonsense complaints to come out. And if they do, there are email messages, recorded video calls, and so on that can clarify reality far easier - meaning HR’s job is made clearly irrelevant, and clearly demonstrates it is a mop job for a handful of busy bodies that cost the company more in efficiency, than they earn the company after accounting for their wage.
Eh, I think HR is a good thing. Knowing that someone works in HR makes it easy to identify sociopaths in the workplace. If they weren’t all grouped together like that I’d have to figure it out one person at a time.
Media corporations don’t often report on it, but that’s a major contributor. They don’t want to inform people that they’re being forced back to the office because WFH culture is costing the top 0.1%, and the government a trillion dollars per year.
That logic doesn’t work as it’s much cheaper to keep the buildings empty while waiting for the loan to end (businesses rarely own their downtown office) and there’s more profit long term for the owner in converting them to apartments.
Would you rather have a trillion dollars today, or need to wait 10 years and then invest $500M to maybe make a little more several years later? Obviously the trillion dollars isn’t all going to one person, but they’re definitely not all chomping at the bit to completely change their revenue model. Commercial real estate is much easier to manage than residential, for one. Additionally, the big corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, etc. all get massive tax breaks from the cities and states that they’re in, with the contingency that they maintain a minimum occupancy in their headquarters. The reasoning is that they get tens of thousands of people moving through the city every day, paying tolls, parking, sales tax, etc… Those businesses aren’t eager to give up their tax breaks that they spent a billion+ obtaining.
Where in the tax code can I see those tax rebates?
I’m not convinced by this tack. Wouldn’t most businesses prefer to just cash in their now unneeded real estate?
Office space isn’t worth nearly as much if people are working remotely. Much less demand.
Yes, exactly why they should sell now before the prices tumble.
Worse than that, most businesses rent. Being able to downsize the office space is boon for any office-based business. Commercial real estate is an expenditure for them, not an investment.
But they still pulled people back into the offices, because it’s actually about management power tripping.
Most bosses would rather burn money in the name of asserting ownership over someone else.
I gave worked for Fortune 500 companies for 20 years, the C-suite are overly focused on what their peers are doing, everyone just follows trends. When RTO became the thing all the popular kids were doing, everyone else piled on the wagon.
It’s basically high school.
Keep in mind that most commercial real estate leases span several years and can’t just reduce their footprint overnight.
I’m fairly convinced they’re doing it to get people to quit voluntarily, rather than laying them off.