How rigid RTO policies could create retention challenges

You attract more bees with honey than you do with vinegar. But what if you just use a net? That’s essentially the strategy many employers are taking as they try to bring employees back to the office full time.

General Motors, Goldman Sachs, and Tesla, among others, have tried—and sometimes failed—to force employees back to the office. The consequences of these mandates, for employers and workers, aren’t yet clear, but one HR professor said leaders may have to treat refusal to come into the office just as they might have pre-Covid.

Empty threats? Employers have been trying for months to coax employees back to the office. They’ve tried free food, more money, and special events to create a sense of FOMO. But employees are still dragging their feet. When GM, for example, told employees to get back to the office, pushback from staff led the company to ultimately push its mandatory RTO to early 2023.

The New York Times told employees to return to their desks last month, but some also refused to go in. Those in media who have balked at RTO mandates have, according to DigiDay, avoided consequences so far, and they’re likely not alone. “There’s still talent shortages, and [employers] know if they push too hard on this, many employees will just leave and they’ll be hard to replace,” Bradford Bell, professor of strategic HR at Cornell University, told HR Brew.

HR check. But these mandates can put undue pressure on already stressed HR departments. Bell said that HR leaders are being put in the middle—between the leaders who want employees back in the office and the employees who don’t want to return. Bell suggested that taking a more decentralized approach, letting each team decide who needs to be in the office to do their jobs, may help reduce some of the pressures on HR.

He explained that there will eventually come a time where employers go from encouraging people to be in the office to explicitly requiring it, and employers may have to impose consequences: “If employees are expected to be in office a certain amount and they’re not abiding to that, just like there was in the past...there’s consequences for that.” Over time, Bell believes managers will figure out how to handle employees who don’t go in, but that any consequences should “be in consultation with HR.”

Not so fast. Bell stressed that while employers who make threats or push employees into the office without flexibility may get butts in seats, it won’t necessarily help them in the long run.

“If an employee is only coming back because of the threat of being fired, I don’t think that’s a great situation for the employee or the employer because the employee’s probably going to be disengaged. They’re probably going to be unhappy. They’re probably not going to be working. They’re probably going to be looking for another job while they’re coming into the office because they don’t want to be there.”—KP

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