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Bosses are using RTO mandates as a way to ‘blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance,’ new research finds
Return to office mandates don’t actually improve a company’s financial performance—despite bosses saying it will.
Office occupancy rates in major metro areas, per building security firm Kastle Systems’ weekly tracker, have held mostly steady at just shy of 50% since vaccines were made widely available. A new working paper by Mark (Shuai) Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Yuye Ding, a PhD student at its Katz Graduate School of Business, found that an office return isn’t actually boosting a company’s bottom line. As PR executive Ed Zitron wrote in Business Insider in November—and Ma quoted in the report—RTO mandates are little more than an attempt to convince investors that decreased revenue and profitability “aren’t a result of poor managerial decisions but the result of lazy workers sitting at home in their pajamas.” Zitron calls it “a genius move” on executives’ part, because it lets them “establish control over workers during an unprecedented societal awareness of labor rights…while also shifting the blame and consequences of poor stock performance onto those least responsible.”
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