https://www.inc.com/sarah-ly--h/do-rto-mandates-boost-company-performance-new-research-suggests-no.html
Bringing workers back to the office won't help your bottom line.
That's according to a new working paper on return-to-office mandates at S&P 500 firms from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. In their research, co-authors Yuye Ding and Mark Ma found "no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after RTO mandates." In fact, their findings suggest that mandates negatively impacted employee satisfaction.
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While the authors focused on large S&P 500 firms in this paper, which is under peer review, they wrote that there "are no strong reasons to believe that our results are not applicable to other firms." Small-business owners: That could mean your company.
So, what's driving these mandates? The authors state that their results are "consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance."
Indeed, while many CEOs are giving up on their RTO push--just 4 percent of U.S. CEOs say they are prioritizing bringing back full-time office work, according to a recent survey from the Conference Board--some are still doubling down on mandates.
Bank of America just cracked down, sending "letters of education" to uncompliant employees. The CEO of Internet Brands, the parent company of WebMD, recently shared a video with employees, saying the company's leaders "aren't asking or negotiating" for employees to return to office--they're "informing."
But with these findings, and with work-from-home time becoming "pancake flat" in 2023--according to a post from work-from-home expert and Stanford economist Nick Bloom--employers may want to rethink the severity of their RTO stance. "Return to the Office is dead," Bloom says.