Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 “high-tech and financial” firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded.
No shit. The people who leave when you arbitrarily make their job worse will obviously be the people who have better options.
To upper management, it’s all fields in a spreadsheet anyway. That you need 3 cheaper juniors to replace that one expensive talent to in the end pay more for less is abstracted away and the source of many meetings to figure out why reality doesn’t match projections. That’s called the efficiency of private enterprises.
In my experience, It’s usually replacing employees in one region with people in an other who can do the same job with less pay. RTO is forced layoffs. They are trying to get you to quit so they can hire your replacement in a location with a cheaper cost of living. If your job can be done remotely than it can be done by someone else remotely unless you’re very specialized or operationally critical.