Fresh analysis from Revelio Labs echoes research showing that office mandates cost companies hard-to-replace workers and hamper hiring.
Revelio’s findings echo a growing consensus in academic research regarding the effects of RTO mandates on organizational health, Abdelwahed noted.
“On the academic side, the robust result is that the hybrid model is the best model,” she said. “If we want what is actually great for the company, it’s hybrid.”
Research from the University of Pittsburgh published last month highlights the challenges companies face in hiring and retention following RTO mandates. Such firms experienced “abnormally high turnover,” which was “more pronounced for female employees, more senior employees, and more skilled employees.” Furthermore, they took “significantly longer” to fill vacancies and saw their hire rates “significantly decrease,” researchers noted.
Despite employees’ adamance about hanging onto flexible work — and academic research backing its benefits — some executives are dialing up efforts to get workers back in the office more often, said Andy Challenger, senior vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement services firm. Over the past year, as the labor market has cooled and employee power has waned, some leaders have used their leverage to push workers back to offices more often, Challenger said.
Generally, the biggest deterrent for companies pursuing tough return-to-office policies has been the “strong possibility of losing lots of workers that you need and want,” Challenger said. But now, “that argument has degraded a little bit in the face of the argument that companies may need to make cuts.”
A broader crackdown
While workers in manufacturing, hospitality and retail have long since reverted to the ways of working they knew before the pandemic, the tug-of-war over return to offices and flexible work remains a thorny issue for white-collar workers and leaders across corporate America.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman defended the policy during an October all-hands meeting, saying that if employees didn’t feel they could work well in that environment, “there are other companies around,” according to Reuters. In another all-hands meeting in early November, Jassy denied that the office mandate was a form of a “backdoor layoff,” according to CNBC.
“This is an effort to strengthen our culture and ensure that our teams are connected so that they can invent, collaborate, and deliver the best results for our customers and the business,” Amazon said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Suggesting otherwise is inaccurate.”
Before Amazon’s announcement, Flex Index had notched only a small uptick in companies calling for workers to be in the office five days a week, with just 33 percent of companies reporting full-time in-office policies, up from 31 percent the previous quarter. Broadly, Sadow said, “It had started to feel like hybrid was the answer.”
Since then, Amazon’s decision has “triggered a cycle” of companies reevaluating office policies “that we may not have seen otherwise,” he said.
‘We’re all adults here’
Among the firms following in Amazon’s footsteps, Dell asked its sales team in early October to return to working fully in the office, and Salesforce called select teams back at the start of October, though CEO Marc Benioff had previously said such mandates “are never going to work.” (In early November, The Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, said its workers would be returning to the office full time in 2025.)
“My point of view is we should be together as much as possible,” new Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol told staff in September, adding that employees should also use their autonomy. “You need to figure out where you need to be to get your job done, then do that. … We’re all adults here.”
(Niccol himself has been criticized for commuting roughly 1,000 miles via private jet from his home in Newport Beach, California, to Starbucks’s headquarters in Seattle in the early phases of his tenure.)
Allen Junge, who works for Activision in Minnesota, is among the employees continuing to push back against the full RTO policy his company enacted at the beginning of 2024. Union employees of the video game publisher held rallies in late October, alleging that Activision and its parent company, Microsoft, have denied remote work accommodations to employees who are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
“They basically said you can work in the office or you can leave,” Junge told The Post. The mandate felt like a means of “pushing everyone we can out right now because we don’t want a layoff.”
Tension around the mandate has seeped into the workplace, said Junge, who is a union member. Workers are “afraid of what the company is going to try to do next,” he added.
“Company culture has taken a nosedive,” Junge said. “You can tell people don’t want to have to be forced into the position they’ve been forced into.”
Activision did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
‘Radio silence’
Other companies have taken heat for their approach. On Nov. 1, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Grindr, arguing that the RTO policy the company implemented in 2023 — which led to the resignation of nearly half its employees — violated federal labor law because it was an attempt to quash a unionization effort.
In August, Grindr announced that workers would be required to spend two days a week at one of the company’s four hubs, just weeks after employees filed a petition to unionize, the NLRB’s complaint states. Employees were given two weeks to decide whether to move to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco — or leave. Though moving for many workers would mean a higher cost of living, the company did not offer to adjust their pay.
One former employee who was involved in union organizing and left Grindr because of the policy said the mandate destroyed a culture of “openness” and “transparency” that employees had prized. The company scheduled fewer all-hands meetings, and workers seeking information about the decision were met with “radio silence” from upper management, said the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they hope to return to the company one day.
“Employees believed the reason behind it was plain union busting,” the employee said, “and now the NLRB has agreed with us.”
In an email to The Post, Grindr called the NLRB’s allegations “meritless,” claiming that “it was only after it was known that the transition back to in-office work was underway that some employees began signing union cards.”
“The ethos behind our hybrid work model of two days a week in the office is to foster collaboration and innovation during our time together,” Grindr said in the statement.
Some leaders have said they do see RTO as a tool for forced attrition. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion column, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — co-leaders of an advisory body on government efficiency announced by President-elect Donald Trump — called for a five-day return to offices for federal workers, saying such a policy “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump said Monday during a news conference.
In May, researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan found that RTO mandates at Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent. High-ranking employees stayed several months less than they might have without the mandate, the research suggests — and in many cases, they went to work for direct competitors.
Pushback was evident in a letter that roughly 500 Amazon Web Services workers signed and sent Oct. 30 to Garman, the AWS CEO, calling for reconsideration of the company’s mandate. In the letter, which was first reported by Reuters, workers argued the policy is “not data-driven” and that it’s “breaking the trust” of hardworking employees who have benefited from flexible arrangements.
Blanket RTO mandates “backfire because it’s not managing your workforce to keep the talent that you have,” said Ellen Ernst Kossek, professor of management at Purdue University and a scholar with the Academy of Management. “I imagine they’ll still make exceptions” for top performers, she added.
Kossek cautioned employers not to discount the costs associated with high turnover, including damage to morale, lower productivity without star performers and burnout among those left to pick up the slack.
Earlier this year, a different study from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh examined the impact of RTO mandates on employee job satisfaction and work-life balance, as well as financial performance at S&P 500 firms. They concluded that mandates led to “significant declines in employees’ ratings of overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management and corporate culture” — and did not translate into improvements in financial performance.
“Our results do not support the argument that managers impose these mandates to increase firm values,” the researchers concluded. Instead, the findings “are consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use RTO for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance.”