COMP NEWS – A new study reveals that RTO policies aren’t just making workers unhappy – it’s making many of them quit. More shockingly, it seems that many RTO policies were designed with just those intentions.

A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable. 

 

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. 

 

While that statistic essentially admits the quiet part out loud, there was some merit to that belief. People did quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies, but it wasn’t enough, the study reports.

 

More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found. Nearly the same number thought their management wanted employees back in the office to monitor them more closely. 

 

The end result has been the growth of a different office culture, one that’s even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID pandemic, the study concludes. 

The report found that many employees feel compelled to practice “performative” productivity in the office.

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.

Remote employees and in-office employees both report spending around two hours of every day not working. Those in-office ones, of course, are probably spending those ten hours a week looking as busy as possible.

To read more about the the report, click here.

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