Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm’s financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction.
Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.
This is an interesting metric. And the research outcome makes a lot of sense.
Also, RTO policies are garbage - but I’m stating the obvious.
The problem with RTO is that you need management to institute procedures to make it worthwhile along with employee expectations.
That you are seeing poorly performing companies pushing for RTO makes sense, they can’t meet metrics in WFO so they are changing how work is occurring. And there probably is a continuation of poor performance as those managers probably aren’t the best.
If you are going to have staff come in some time to the office, you have to make the face time worthwhile. That means all staff in certain departments are in that day and you use some of that time on employee training and network building.