Many employees will not return to the office but will continue to work from home, and just wait to see what happens. Some will try “coffee badging” or barely coming in, and There will be a flood of new doctor’s notes looking for medical exemptions.
This will put the onus on managers, who after all of the recent flattening are quite stretched thin (and many of them don’t agree with the RTO plans), to not only call out these employees, but eventually hold them accountable. This will drag on for months, and will be further complicated by calling IT employees back full time by the end of the year.
I am not dreaming this up. Ask the HR people at the State of Ohio how their RTO is going, and they will tell you all of this and more. Is HR staffed to handle this many individual situations? Not even close.
An on point post by @2431+1qB6FXi3.