HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out - a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving.
According to the report, most employees working remotely and in-person both feel the need to demonstrate productivity, which for more than a third of employees means being seen socializing and moving around the office. That intense need to be visible may actually be harming productivity, study author and BambooHR’s own head of HR Anita Grantham concluded in her findings.
A full 42 percent of employees who responded to the Bamboo survey said they show up solely to be seen by bosses and managers. If bosses think their presence in the office is making any difference to the amount of work getting done, the results indicate that’s not the case.
I know this is on the ‘work reform’ community so I understand most of the comments have that ‘bent’ to them. I appreciate that.
And I dont want to legitimize giant corporations doing shitty things to employees, so I hope it doesn’t come across as defending that behavior.
BUuuuuuttttt, I understand why and how this happens. Lets say hypothetically, you are in a big company or even a public sector/gov’t organization. You’ve moved to remote work across the board. That’s awesome!
Now imagine if you had a team that is struggling with competing priorities and limited resources. But you also have 3-4 people on that team that could have retired years ago, but they haven’t. Why? Because they can just fucking mail-it-in at home and do little or nothing. As a manager that’s overworked yourself, starting the “removal” paperwork process, especially on a public sector employee or an employee at a large company, is daunting. That can be a full-time job in and of itself. Now, multiply that x3 or 4 because you don’t just have one employee doing this. That’s going to be brutal.
What’s a much easier option? RTO. Is it a sure-fire way to get those 3 or 4 to retire? No, they might just come in and be lazy in the office, but there is a good chance that commute, parking expense, extra time away from their family is going to push them over the edge.
There are absolutely, without a doubt, people abusing remote work. RTO is a ‘lazy’ but semi-understandable way for managers to drive some of those bad apples away. At least in theory. The article suggests not all do.
From my own anecdotal evidence, when people started returning to office, the retirements went up and people moved around more. This freed up positions and let organizations, who were stagnate, grow and promote people.
The down side is: some of your top talent will leave if they get caught up in the RTO mandates.
I’m sorry but this seems very illogical. You’re saying that, as a company thats fully remote, its easier to get the WHOLE COMPANY back into the office than it is to do the paperwork to remove a handful of bad employees, while risking losing some of your better employees??
Let me get this straight. You want everyone’s working conditions to be worse so some people wil choose to retire? Why stop there then? Dock everyone’s pay, reduce vacation time, force people to work over weekends - that will REALLY drive up the people retiring!
I totally get it and my solution is very similar, see to me going to the office feels like a lot of work but I want to keep my job obviously and so obviously what I intend to do is set fire to the office building so none of us can go back to the office even if we wanted to.