More companies are calling employees back into the office five days a week, but workers aren’t convinced full-time RTO is the right move, numerous studies suggest.
Some employees would rather lose a romantic partner or get a divorce than return-to-office five days a week, one LiveCareer survey found. Other surveys show remote work ranks high on the list of benefits workers receive from a job; in some cases they’d even take a pay cut to keep it.
Even so, large employers like Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T are forging ahead with full-time RTO plans. One smaller firm, Cameo, is betting that workers will comply with a four-day-a-week policy, thanks to a raise.
“Elegant solution” to the RTO problem. Cameo, a platform where customers pay for personalized videos from celebrities, had not had a formal RTO policy since its employees began working from home five years ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic, CEO Steven Galanis told HR Brew.
But upon realizing its sales team was more efficient working from the office, it started to reconsider its approach to fully remote work.
While Galanis considers Cameo’s Chicago headquarters to be its “center of gravity,” he noted the workforce is distributed, with about half of its 50-person staff based outside of the Windy City. So when the CEO and his leadership team decided to institute a four-day-in-office policy for its Chicago-based employees, they threw in a potential perk for those who complied: A $10,000 raise on their base salaries.
“We felt like we were asking more out of our Chicago employees if we were going to make them come in four days a week,” Galanis said. He described the raise as “an elegant solution to the reality of having a fully distributed team.”
The CEO said everyone covered by the RTO policy complied with it during the first two weeks it was instituted.
While none of Cameo’s remote employees have elected to move to Chicago yet, Galanis said he’s hoping a $5,000 relocation reimbursement might convince some of them to do so.
Galanis—who is based in Miami but works from the Chicago office Monday to Thursday—said working in-person helps foster off-the-cuff conversations that might not happen over Slack. He described a recent 45-minute meeting with one of his senior product managers that occurred simply because he ran into her as he was leaving the office.
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“There’s just been great collaboration that’s already paying dividends,” Galanis said.
When one size doesn’t fit all. Both remote work and compensation can engender employee loyalty, a recent FlexJobs survey found, though the former beats out the latter. Some 68% of respondents said remote work options would make them more loyal to a company, while 63% said higher pay would make the difference.
More respondents cited remote work as the leading factor when considering a new job (37%) than those who listed salary and benefits as the top consideration (25%).
Even so, offering a pay premium to come into the office might be enough to retain existing talent, or attract new hires, said Toni Frana, a career expert with FlexJobs.
“For some people,” a $10,000 raise “might be enough for them to stay where they are or to accept a job…even though it might not have the exact remote work schedule they were looking for,” she said.
She added that in the case of RTO policies like Cameo’s, where in-office requirements apply to some employees but not others, “it’s important that there is a consistent and conscious effort to make sure that employment and development opportunities, promotion opportunities” are the same across the workforce.
Cameo has a budget for its remote workers to travel to the Chicago HQ once a month, and its VP of people, Adam Ostrum, said the company is continuing to encourage those employees to take advantage of this perk now that their colleagues are in the office most of the time. This way, “it doesn't feel like anyone’s really treated unfairly or left out.”
He said he envisions the $10,000 raise making a difference for younger employees who earn less than six figures, as the pay premium could help them move downtown or pay for pet care, for example. Ostrum also believes being in the office will make a big difference for younger workers’ career development.
“This business has always been built around young, hungry people, especially on the sales side, and we really felt that the best opportunity for them to succeed was to be around their peers,” he said.