Cisco
Many bosses with some form of RTO policy plan to ask employees to spend more time in the office next year.
In a recent survey from Resume.org, nearly three-quarters of execs at companies that have already implemented some form of an RTO policy said they would require workers to be in the office at least three days a week by the end of 2025.
The November survey results of 900 business leaders serve as a reminder that many bosses plan to continue pushing to see more heads bobbing atop cubicles in the new year.
Some of the companies demanding more face time instead of FaceTime are big-name employers like Amazon, AT&T, and Starbucks.
In the Resume.org survey, 73% of respondents whose companies already have an RTO rule said they would require their people to report to the office at least three times a week by the end of 2025. Almost one in three expect to require workers to come in each workday. Only 2% expect to let workers show up only once a week or less.
While many employers calling workers back to the office point to productivity — as respondents did in the Resume.org survey — being in person doesn't necessarily boost how much gets done, according to Nicole Kyle, who researches the future of work.
She told Business Insider that in many studies, productivity and performance don't drastically change when workers aren't side-by-side. Instead, such metrics can remain steady or even increase if there is more remote or hybrid work at an organization, said Kyle, who is cofounder of CMP Research.
However, various studies have come to conflicting conclusions on how remote, hybrid, or fully in-office work impacts productivity — and one complicating factor could be the matter of how best to define or measure productivity.
Employees, in some cases, have pushed back — often unsuccessfully — against RTO mandates. Yet many business leaders don't regard these mandates as asking too much of the people they're paying to do a job.
In the survey, about one-third of bosses said they were worried workers would quit because of the RTO policies, while 49% said they weren't very concerned or weren't concerned at all. Of those surveyed, 18% were uncertain.
About seven in 10 execs said the reason to have workers back IRL is to promote collaboration and teamwork. Nearly six in 10 said the move was aimed at improving communication. And about half pointed to a desire to strengthen the organization's culture and raise productivity.
Lisa Walker, a managing partner at the executive search firm DHR Global, told BI that some employers can benefit from bringing back workers because it allows more experienced people to mentor newer workers. She said that's often harder to do when workers aren't in person.
"To get the junior people into the office, you need to get the senior people back to the office," she said.
In the Resume.org survey, four in 10 respondents said they wanted to use office space that might otherwise lie fallow.
It's understandable that bosses wouldn't want to let sometimes pricey real estate go unused, though strict in-office rules can also have a cost.
Researchers from the University of Pittsburg and other academic institutions recently reported that S&P 500 companies that require workers to return to the office subsequently experience "abnormally high" rates of workers quitting and have a harder time filling open roles.
The researchers found that those leaving are often female, more senior, or more skilled. The findings are based on the employment histories of more than 3 million tech and finance workers, as reported on LinkedIn.
"The return-to-office mandates are having pretty specific and negative impacts and causing brain drain from companies," said Kyle, who wasn't involved in the research.
Perhaps with those types of concerns in mind, some leaders have stated they likely would only tighten the RTO screws if productivity suffered. Among them, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that the company wouldn't require workers to come to the office as long as they remained on task when working from home.
