Return-To-Office Mandate Forces Employees Into the Office 4 Days a Week for “Collaboration” Following Years of Remote Work, But All Meetings Are Still Online Anyways—Then the Company Fires Half the Team and Remaining Employees Get 2 Times the Workload

And this idea that RTO wasn't being pushed simply to fill offices is supported by the evidence from several studies. A 2024 study, “Return to Office Mandates, Brain Drain and Gender Difference,” gathered data through “tracking over 3 million tech and finance workers’ employment histories on LinkedIn." They found “abnormally high” employee turnover following these madates and "greater difficulties with talent attraction." In their own analysis of the same study, Baylor quantified these findings of abnormal turnover as a “13–14 percent increase." Baylor further concluded that job vacancies for companies that enacted RTO increased in duration by 23%, indicating that companies possibly struggled to attract talent post-RTO.

This represents an almost hidden cost to the employer. The studies found that this attrition was not evenly distributed across all staff, and that highly skilled employees and mid- to top-level managers were among the groups most likely to leave their job post-RTO. Both studies concluded that brain drain and lingering vacant positions would eventually attract lower-skilled workers as a high cost of RTO mandates.

The studies present this cost as an unintended result of RTO policies. But I think this could tell another story... 

Perhaps, the departure of higher-paid, more senior staff is a desired result of these policies. Perhaps these were decisions that were intentionally made to more greatly decrease the cost of payroll by forcing out more senior and higher paid staff.

The layoffs we have seen in the last couple of years are decisions made to increase profits, right now, this quarter. Some of the tech companies that have made headline-making layoffs have done so despite record profits. The layoffs were simply a way to make the companies even more profitable right that very moment.  

While there is an argument to be made that skilled staff is actually usually a better value because of their efficiency and the quality of the work they are doing, the immediate short-term quarterly profits aren't dependent on having skilled staff doing the work. And the focus is short-sighted and immediate: reduce the bottom line now. It will be a long time before the cracks in the pavement begin to show, and by then the executives will have bailed out with golden parachutes. Those who have replaced them will be mightily confused when the bottom falls out of the company's sales and revenue as the company flounders.

In companies that we have seen employ this strategy since 2023, RTO is first used to reduce staffing levels indirectly. Then once staff have been gathered together for “collaboration” and “culture,” the layoffs hit. Now the remaining employees are shell-shocked. Whatever culture and trust was left is gone. There really isn't anyone left to collaborate with. And everyone is looking around wondering why they had to come back to this office in the first place.

But now, all that extra work needs to get done somehow. Or at least the managers need to say that it is. So, they give some weak justification about how everyone should be more efficient and push impossible workloads on the remaining workers without paying them for the extra responsibilities of those senior staff that left. This, of course, leads to burnout, more turnover, and sends the company into a tailspin.

This is all what is happening here in this story, where this struggling employee shared how their employer had mandated RTO for “collaboration” before hitting their team with surprise layoffs.