The data is in: RTO policies don't improve employee performance or company value, but controlling bosses don't care
Billionaire CEOs were quick to sing the praises of working from home at the start of the pandemic, calling it the way of the future — but over the last three years, they've slowly changed their tune.
Late last year, Forbes reported that 90% of companies will return to the office in 2024, with 28% threatening to fire workers who don't comply.
But it turns out that the motivations for calling workers back to the office may have less to do with employee productivity or profit margins and everything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back, according to a recent study published by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration from Pitt's Katz Graduate School of Business, who led the study, told BI he started the research hoping to understand why some S&P 500 firms want employees to return to the office while other firms avoid calling them back.
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"One of the most common arguments management suggests is that they want to return to office because employee productivity is low at home, and they believe returns to office would help firms improve performance and ultimately improve the firm's value," Ma told BI. "That's the reason they give — but our results actually do not support these arguments."
What's even more stupid about return to office is that we know that commuting is a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. So working from home would not only be an improvement in work conditions, sparing millions of individuals hours of wasted commuting time each week, it would also be an easy way to reduce pollution and mitigate global warming.
Laws should be passed that mandate employees can work from home whenever it cannot be demonstrated by the company that being on site is absolutely necessary to do the job.
If you look around, fast food places and Pepsico and everyone price gouging, it's a race to the bottom for a last cash-grab before what appears to be an inevitable recession -- brought on by some of these same conglomerates. Mass layoffs (tech sector over 250k layoffs last year across the board), among inflation just murdering people's wallets. Credit card debt is over 1 trillion now, people are "surviving" off of high interest debt to maintain life at this point, but it's not sustainable at current rates.
The other stupid part is that WFH makes more sense from a business perspective. Having to pay less in office rent and utilities is great for saving on costs.
Not only that, less people driving means less people buying gas, which drives the gas price down as we saw during the pandemic. When the gas price goes down, everything is cheaper. This could be a great way to get a bit of relief on the inflation.