The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:
In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.
Dell, Amazon, Google, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase have tracked employee badge swipes to ensure employees are coming into the office as often as expected. Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can’t get a promotion.
Some company leaders are adamant that remote work can disrupt a company’s ability to innovate. However, there’s research suggesting that RTO mandates aren’t beneficial to companies. A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health. And an analysis of 457 S&P 500 companies in February found RTO policies hurt employee morale and don’t increase company value.
A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health.
It’s almost like the work force actually values the quality of their lives more than … umm, honestly I’ve never been able to figure out a positive side for companies pushing RTO. Report after report show remote work improves productivity, employee retention, is perceived as a significant perk to attract new talent, and reduces corporate overhead (that last one is just an assumption on my part).
Seriously, what is the attraction for RTO?
They get to use all that cheap real estate they bought during the pandemic. What more reasoning could you ever need!
A lot of them around me don’t even own, just rent. They’d save money by just not having to keep that infrastructure up and running at max and getting out of their contract when it ends.
Daily commute and sleep deprivation that derives from it is mind numbing. The only reason leaders want people to work at the office is so they don’t pay for empty offices.
Want people to innovate ? Give them free time to do research on a subject your company could benefit from.
Want people to meet with their teams ? Organize team activities once in a while. Everyone will benefit and be happier for it.
They don’t want people to innovate. Innovation is a buzzword that they use to market themselves as something other than parasites.
Most companies want to safely follow market trends to suck away large profit margin with minimal payout to workers. If they make a product that doesn’t work, they just assert that it does and that the customer is wrong.
That’s also why they intentionally quiet fire seniors like in the article. They don’t give a fuck about quality or innovation. They want the cheapest labor possible while hiking service/product pricing.
They don’t want employees to be happy. They want them to be cheap and exploitable.
That is literally the base form of businesses in the flawed reality of capitalism.
But will they learn…
Their stocks go up in the short term and they have golden parachutes so they have learned that running companies into the ground benefits them.
They do learn, just the wrong lessons.
Learn what? This was the specific intended outcome: layoffs without severance or unemployment.*
*Unemployment benefits aren’t totally off the table due to the companies changing of job requirements, but that’s going to depend on local laws and individual employee circumstances.
My hope is that companies would learn from the brain drain side effects in the long run. You’re absolutely right that greater profit is what drives this and it was intentional, but it is short-sighted.
The company I work for just terminated a substantial percentage of its workforce. It was done without truly understanding the effect on many programs. I’m now standing on a desert island, alone, trying to figure out how to continue satisfying a customer with nearly all the knowledge and talent to best do that stripped away. Doing the job of three people was hard enough before. Now I’m doing the job of X people, a variable I can’t even adequately quantify now. And a lot of that work is so wildly outside of my sphere of knowledge.
Decisions that these large companies are making are causing side effects that they may not feel for many years, but they will… And it won’t matter because those executives have accomplished everything they wanted for themselves in those first moments.
Don’t be evil. Heh.
I really do hope a few of these companies learn. I’d love for people to not be treated as expendable assets that can be ground into dust, but as people to nourish and develop. I’d love to cheer for them. I’d love to contribute to their work.
Short sighted for who? Executive compensation is tied to stock performance via options. If their actions boost the stock price in the short term, what do they care about the companies performance at a future date after they’ve cashed out?
We’re currently in the extraction phase of neoliberal economic system and it’s only downhill from here.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.
In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce.
In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.
Apple representative Josh Rosenstock told The Washington Post that the report drew “inaccurate conclusions” and “does not reflect the realities of our business."
Yet some companies have struggled to make employees who have spent months successfully doing their jobs at home eager to return to the office.
Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can’t get a promotion.
The original article contains 705 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
One of the funniest things about most of these companies enforcing RTO is that their “on-site interviews” are still virtual. So you believe being in-person is more effective except when it comes to paying for travel expenses for interviewees.
Just shows the massive hypocrisy behind these RTO mandates.
You see how that’s more convenient for the interviewee too, right?
I would imagine most of these remote interviews are just an initial conversation and an employer would insist on a formal interview in person if they have a policy on physical presence. My policy is to advance the requirement that there be hot chicks in the office if I need to be in that space.
Just let employees choose what works for them
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That does not sound corporate enough.
I don’t blame anyone. It doesn’t work for me. I have my own space and can be productive at home. I don’t need to buy at the office getting coughed on or dealing with air temps.
Maybe companies should listen to muh free market instead of realtors wanting to keep downtowns on life support
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Senior talent also tends to save the company money by avoiding the mistakes of less experienced people, but C level positions don’t tend to recognize that because they don’t see problems that were avoided or mitigated.
Compliance fines come out of a different budget so who cares
they don’t get rewarded for problems avoided. they get paid for “fixing shit”
Yes, that is what I am saying. It is also rewarding the part of their job that is less important than avoiding the need to fix shit.
