Return-to-Office? It May Be a Covert Layoff

RTO mandates may be an indicator of financial troubles or future staff reductions

Shelly Fagan
3 min readMar 21, 2024
Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash

Research reveals what many workers suspected: requiring staff to return to the office has nothing to do with productivity, collaboration or real estate values.

Instead, these policy changes are often a power play by the decision makers as a means to control employees, reduce staff, and provide a scapegoat for poor performance.

If you receive the dreaded email to drag yourself back to the office, you would be wise to dust off your resume because the biggest problem may not be that your commute is about to get longer.

Many times RTO mandates can be an indicator of an employer’s financial troubles or future staff reductions – a “soft” layoff without the blowback.

Survey Says

Employers have been on a massive PR campaign attributing return-to-office mandates (RTO) as needed to encourage collaboration, but data indicates that this may be a thinly-veiled move used as a means to force staff to quit.

A study by the University of Pittsburgh revealed that companies that issued return-to-office mandates experienced no improvement in financial performance while 99% saw a drop in employees’…

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Shelly Fagan

Complicated subjects made accessible. Politics, Basic Income, Philosophy. I follow back.