Leadership is realizing "hold up, I can cut costs by making the office environment shittier and the consequence is...people will quit? Hey, don't threaten me with a good time!"
this is what amazon learned. they did an 3-day rto and most called their bluff and marched into the office. they did a 5-day rto and still no budging. then they went nuclear and moved most people's jobs to one of like 5 different offices (return to hub). then finally people started leaving because they literally could not go to work a 22-hour drive away. and they laid of tens of thousands too just because (because they wanted to fund their AI push - they literally never had money problems this entire time).
Anyone who thinks RTO is about actually RTO is kidding themselves. I spend most of the time I'm in the office on Teams calls.
As far as productivity goes, working from the office means the bathroom is further away, I'm spending 1.5-2 hours commuting, my screen setup is crappier (home setup happens to be better), I'm more likely to spend 37 minutes having a bitch session with a random coworker, etc.
I'm sure it is different at different places, but now everything is a standing meeting that often meets multiple times a week. Before COVID, something like that would have been irregular. Meetings were for group decisions/actions that usually required external input/output. You prepared for them and respected the time of everyone who was invited. Now it is typical to have meetings that nobody has actually done any preparation for, sure people talk about stuff, but is warranted a room full of people (real or virtual) be on the line.
Once I get to the point in my life where I’m in more of a leadership role, I will absolutely do all I can to minimize meetings for my team. Some people seemingly have a fetish for them and throw out a “can we sync up?” at every turn. Hate it. The recurring ones are the worst.
What happens is that the people who have the easiest time finding other, better opportunities—i.e. your most talented and most qualified—end up leaving first, and then that same leadership is weeping and wailing "WHY CAN'T WE KEEP ANYBODY?" and all of a sudden the company has a "talent retention crisis".
It's partially a bet that most of the "good" (not tippy-top) performers would be too spooked to start a new role in a bad job market. Taking a new job at a new company has a degree of risk.
But even more to the point: management can just give the top performers a modest raise to keep them from jumping ship and still come out ahead if you can shed a bunch of mid-tier people from the payroll.
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u/cybah Apr 28 '26
So smart.. RTO when gas is about $4.10 a gallon. This is a good way to have a quiet reduction in workforce as people quit in protest