Some company heads hoped return-to-office mandates would make people quit, survey says
arstechnica.com
Nearly two in five (37 percent) managers, directors, and executives believe their organization enacted layoffs in the last year because fewer employees than they expected quit during their RTO. And their beliefs are well-founded: One in four (25 percent) VP and C-suite executives and one in five (18 percent) HR pros admit they hoped for some voluntary turnover during an RTO.
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Really dumb, because it means your most talented employees will quit (because they can get a better offer elsewhere). This isn’t like a targeted layoff.
Other than short term, greed most executives are extremely stupid.
It’s not that they’re stupid, it’s that their incentives aren’t the same as the long term wellbeing of the company.
Happy cake day
If you can replace one talented high-wage employee with 3 college hires then do this a couple times statistically you're still going to retain some talented employees because not all can leave. Those that remain will train the others ou of necessity either directly by management or indirectly by a fear of missing timelines/ego/being the local expert/etc.
Management knows this and actively encourages this behavior because by the time the talented employee burns out and self-destructs, at least one trainee will be competent enough to keep things moving.
Or, they don't really need the expertise they claim to need.
It really depends a lot on how junior those "talented" employees are.
The senior types won't let themselves burn out and self-destruct, it's only the gifted juniors (who are way less productive than the seniors and lack the senior's capability to enhance other people's productivity, no matter how amazing their raw talent is) who will fall for that shit.
Put gifted juniors through the meat grinder a couple of times and the ones who are left recognize that shit a mile away and either avoid ending up in such work environments, refuse to take that shit and exercise informal control around them to stop it if they can or simply leave.
It's not by chance that the Tech companies with the worst work environments (such as Google) are heavilly focused on straight-out-of-uni graduates with high grades as "talent" - their meat-grinder environment can't retain people beyond a certain seniority unless they're moved out of the meat-grinder parts - and this then gets reflected on the quality of what they produced ("messy" barelly begins to describe how badly designed and architectured the software that comes out of Google is).
As a college grad, I'm pretty sure they aren't replacing anyone. They're just dumping the work on other employees and telling us we need another 5 years of experience to hire us.