Employer demands all employees return to the office 4 days a week despite there not being enough desks or even seats for everyone—this marks a brutal end to the previous 2-day flexible working policy: 'People often have to work at the cafeteria'

Well, you'd think that someone would stop and count how many desks and chairs are in the office that they're demanding everyone return to, and then count how many staff they're asking to be there all at once. And you would think that there would be some effort to fix the problem or simply reverse the policy once the problem was recognized.

Like in this story, the offices that are pushing employees to return to the office are often also the sort that embraced “hot desking" in open-plan offices. Where employees don't have a set desk to work at, and everyone works at big tables with barely any personal space to speak of. 

Hot desking, open-plan offices, and RTO policies share similar motivations for an employer, or at least the reason given for them is. 

Open-plan hot desking is supposed to foster greater collaboration or something. But because we humans are such creatures of habit, we just end up all sitting in the same place every day anyway. That, and there's no collaborating happening, or any talking at all. Everyone has their noise-cancelling headphones permanently on to block out the distracting noise of the people crowded around us as we desperately wish we had one of those cubicles people complained about so much in the 80s and 90s.

RTO is the same thing, it's supposed to increase collaboration, but really all it's doing is demotivating employees and killing morale, all in the name of making the managers more comfortable.

See the original story, that the employee shared with an online community, below.

My employer has been steadily increasing the in-office requirements, from 2 flexible days in 2023 that nobody cared if we were going on not, to now 4 mandatory in-office days with badge monitoring and weekly attendance reports to managers and people being let go for not complying.

The office is at full capacity, and people often have to work at the cafeteria, meeting rooms and whatever common areas they can find. Their solution to this was to implement assigned seating last year. Not sure how this would fix the problem of more people than seats but fine. I got my seat and I made my desk nice.

Now they sent us an email that they are going back to hoteling and that we are to empty our desks by next week, and that moving forward we are to seat at whatever desk we can find while making it clear that we are still expected to come Monday-Thursday. I’m so p**d off because they literally do not care. 

The big executives making this decision have their fancy private offices (which are empty for most of the time because I guess they don’t have to go to the office like we do) while the rest of us have to seat at the cafeteria, stairs or even on the floor or else be fired. And the worst part is: people are not upset enough about this. My colleagues act like it’s only a mild inconvenience that they will need to arrive early to get a seat or work at the cafeteria.

I’m just as furious at the people making this decision as I am with my colleagues blindly accepting this.