Employers used return-to-office to make workers quit

If what the article says is true, it seems they rolled back about a decade and a half of diversity in tech initiatives. It also speaks to how little power those organizations have.

Since I can remember there have been nonstop “women in tech” clubs to encourage women to advance their career even if it’s not easy. And it’s not easy if you have to take care of a child. The company might have a monthly zoom call and schedule a female senior manager to give a speech about her career. Wonderful.

And then RTO hits. And some of those same senior managers are requiring their teams to commute to an office and sit at a desk for vague, unspecified, or otherwise underjustified reasons.

The result is predictable. People resign. But some people are more likely to leave than others. Single men with no other obligations are less likely to mind leaving at 8:30 and getting back at 6:30. Women may not be able to.

It turns out, those zoom calls were largely useless. It’s not a mindset issue. It’s a labor issue. Women in tech initiatives were tolerated as long as they positioned themselves as mindset or career growth within the company, and didn’t encourage organizing or asking anything of the company. But a truly effective movement would have gave employers pause before mandating RTO.

The General Motors CFO basically said as much on an investor call in 2022 or 2023. That didn't get rid of enough people, so now they've implemented stack ranking because that worked so well at MSFT. That said, they get a "free" 5% workforce reduction every year that they want it, no severance, no buyout, just let go. There will be more of that coming, particularly in US automotive after the UAW deal and the current sad state of vehicle sales and the write downs on EVs.

What's overlooked is that today's workforce is not ruled by a cadre of hardcore company people any more. Work from home is generally enjoyed on every level of the hierarchy. Likewise, even your boss's boss will have a family and share childcare responsibilities, which creates strong demands for flexibility and autonomy that are hard to argue against. This means, leadership doesn't want to, and can't really enforce return-to-office all that well.

So, unless I am missing something big, heavy-handed measures mandated from the CEO ultimately won't change modern workplace culture.

(If you like WFH though please do your part: Be productive and communicative from home and argue against return-to-office at any occasion to the full extent of your influence within the organization)

I don't doubt that this happened, but what percentage of RTO efforts were about intentional attrition vs something else?

The intentional attrition strategy seems like it only makes sense if you have a lot of dead weight on your staff but are stable as a business. If the business is in really dire financial straits, I think you actually fire people.

If overall you have a healthy business and a revenue per employee is significantly above costs per employee (and if you previously observed that growing the team helped you grow revenue), boosting attrition will probably hurt you, right? You may improve margins in the next few quarters but eventually your decreased ability to build/sell will cut into your revenue growth. But I think there have been plenty of companies that seemed to be healthy and succeeding who didn't have a clear reason to want attrition, and who still pushed RTO, which seems like probably a bad move?

I do believe a fair share of execs did earnestly buy into the idea that employees are more productive from the office, and if employees were ok with working from the office 5 years ago and they're being paid more now, they would just accept it -- i.e. execs hoped they could mostly retain their staff but get more value out of them. And I further continue to believe that these execs were biased by largely isolated from inefficiencies in the open-plan-office / too-few-meeting-rooms before times.

- The CEO never had to scramble to find another room when an important conversation went long -- whoever had the room next was forced to scramble.

- If the COO felt that a meeting needed to be scheduled last minute, people around them made it happen ... meanwhile 3 levels down the org-chart, a design doc review meeting involving 3 teams can't be scheduled until the week after next because we need the 12-seat conference rooms in 2 offices to be free at the same time.

- The head of HR has an office with a door that closes -- for good reason! But for this reason they did not suffer reduced productivity when listening to music through their headphones for 8 hours a day simultaneously caused tinnitus and failed to fully drown out the sale bro one row of desks away.

Constructive dismissal is apparently only legal if you do it at enormous scale.

Usually stack ranking is aimed at culling the bottom of the stack, no?

Wonder how getting rid of the employees with the most agency and options will turn out for the office-heads.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against companies implementing RTO given that many offices workers are returning to are shells of their former selves. Seems like companies still pushing RTO are using it to cover up issues, only some of which are HR.

As a biz owner, this kind of decision making would stress me out.

No one knows what the quality of the people will be. The people okay with driving 2+ hours are going to stick around. What kind of person is that? A hard worker? Maybe. A dedicated worker? Maybe...

Or is it the people so untalented, they cannot find another job, and do this for survival?

I don't know the answer, and I'd be horrified to roll the dice on that. I'm unsure what the packages look like to cut your lowest performers, but at least you aren't rolling dice.

Side note: I can get nation wide talent way way way cheaper when I offer remote/flexible schedule. I kind of appreciate the big companies arent sucking this labor market, leaves me room.

"We need team players"

feels like a pill being used purposely for it's unpleasant side effects.

Of course they did. Companies are looking to cut costs to appease shareholders, and this is an effective method for pushing people to leave rather than layoffs.

Gov of Canada RTO is creeping up just fine. Now at 3 days for some groups.

Got to support your restaurant businesses and parking lot donors. Never mind the insufficient capacity at the offices when it was just 2 days (they sold a bunch of buildings first!). Never mind the poor public transport in the capital (esp after LRT; instead of 1 bus, its bus-train-bus) - and it performs really well in the winter - its gonna be great. Never mind the people who now have to drive in traffic inconveniencing themselves and those who actually have to be on the road. Never mind the eco-footprint of their decisions - given how much they cry about how 'Canada should do more to fight climate change' (so virtue signalling at its best). Cant wait for winter when overcrowded offices causes illness that we can take back to our spouses, kids, and grandparents - I guess this should cause some natural attrition (the deadly kind).

I'm kind of confused about this, can't you just get yourself fired (without doing anything illegal) instead of quitting? Are people concerned with the civil law risk?

In some companies, this is a silent layoff. Especially in west europe, its easier to say "well if you don't like it, quit yourself"

The real problem is that those which leave are those who have [better] options. So by utilizing this kind of strategy you select for the employees you least want.

This is kinda smart, maybe employees can be kinda smart too and try to call the bluff until they get moved into the place to make sure the office actually exists?

"A study presented to the National Capital Planning Commmission adds to this growing body of evidence, showing that mandated returns to the office in the federal sector will lead to a workforce that skews older and less diverse. The study highlights the risk of the federal workforce becoming out of touch with the dynamic, diverse society it aims to serve."

The largest demographic in that "dynamic, diverse" society is not people who make noise online about how they do not want to work in an office. It is older folks who have worked in offices for most or all of their working lives. Who is serving who? The concern should be about becoming out of touch with working in an office or other place of work and the generations of Americans who did it and continue to do it.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2...

It's curious to me that so many companies have so many low value employees that if a ton of them quit then that is good for the company.

It's not unbelievable - I've worked at a few mediocre places before - but what a strange world we live in.

Leadership at my former place publicly despised remote work. Only senior engineers were allowed to work remotely, and the rest had to work at one of those nasty startup coworking spaces 4x per week.

During my tenure, that policy didn't have the effect the CEO desired, and it led to the tech department shrinking, despite the headcount more than doubling. It was tremendously hard to find good engineers that were willing to put up with the CEO's antics, despite offering them above market average comp.

If your startup is uncool, one of the first few things you should review is your remote work policy. Some really crappy businesses might be having an easier time hiring competent employees just because they allow WFH.

No shit, that was always the goal.

Unless the employees came on under remote work it’s very hard for them to say the work policy is a change in working conditions, even if it fundamentally is.

For instance I now have to drive to work where previously transit was an option, so my commute has changed from work time to just an additional 12 hours of uncompensated labour and thousands of dollars in fuel, maintenance, and tolls.

Hooray!

On top of the sad state of the job market, there is a trend now on companies posting fake jobs:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/4-in-10-companies-say-theyve...

Trying to get a mass of workers to quit should be illegal. At least in the US, this is done to get around the WARN act and to potentially weasel out of paying severances that may be required or dealing with unemployment claims.

I think we sort of knew this was the goal for some of these RTO orders: making the workplace unpleasant is a way to do a reduction in workforce without having a scary layoff. Management just shifts the decision to employees. Scummy, but not exactly a new strategy for trying to shed people without generating a ton of bad PR.

That’s a great strategy if you want workers to quit. But if you’re hiring, (like for instance if having employees makes you more money than the employees cost) what you want is the opposite. The key insight is going to be: when they’re hiring again will those same companies continue to offer remote options. The answer is probably some will some won’t.

what i don't understand is why do they expect the dead weight to leave as opposed to the top talent leaving, since they have more options?

> This suggests that these departures are not just numerical losses but also qualitative ones, affecting team dynamics, institutional knowledge, and overall performance.

No crap Copernicus.

Why does management insist on believing that their workforce is made up of interchangeable cogs is it because the reality is just too uncomfortable?

...duh?

Whenever an employer implements policies that unpopular, you can safely assume trying to force attrition without paying severance is a goal, whether primary or secondary.

Of course, this has a cascade effect, where the people who have the most prospects and valued that policy not being true are going to leave, and then that has an outsized effect on organizational health, which pushes other people into leaving.

I heard it said once that someone on The Dana Carvey Show knew it was cancelled when they found the free food container in the break room, which they'd never seen anything but overflowing, was empty. I suspect that a number of executives are now discovering they have had similarly not-obviously-critical absences become the canaries in the coal mine for others, as well as how hard it is to change perception of whether people want to work for you.

"Young talent, more inclined toward flexible work arrangements, may view federal employment as an unattractive option, leading to a significant loss of fresh perspectives and innovative ideas."

Yeah, unlike in the House, Senate and White House, where we have 85 year-olds running the country.

Maybe, but the reality is remote workers aren’t as productive and don’t contribute to company culture enough (at least in the organizations I’ve worked for).

And frankly, if we’re going to hire someone remote, why would we not hire someone in India for $15 an hour? Or someone in Europe for $35? Remote work doesn’t make sense for most software positions

Step 1 of Slavery: Train employees to follow your every stupid whim lol