CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

We found an average 20-30% productivity improvement and nearly 40% morale improvement with remote work.

When our elderly CEO decided enough was enough and forced everyone back into the human hamster wheels we saw a reversion to the pre-remote work performance across the board basically immediately and employee satisfaction dropped considerably below pre-pandemic levels. Interestingly the people who refused to comply with the mandate saw their performance improve even more, which made the employee review consequence for non compliance stick.

This is a statistical average so there are outliers, and the population was bimodal. Some people genuinely did better in the office and saw performance improve when they returned. But that definitely was not the mode.

So, I feel for the folks who aren’t part of the general group that does better at home, and they are the ones who say things like this. Remote work is great for business not because it improves morale and productivity (which it definitively does) even if it doesn’t for you). It’s because warehousing bags of mostly water to sit all day on zoom commuting to telecommute with their teams scattered all over the world is economically inefficient.

We saved like $5m/y with bring your own device by ceasing the corporate subsidy for blackberries. We could save hundreds of millions by ceasing corporate subsidies for your chair with bring your own office.

The fact a board can improve EPS by a significant amount, improve morale and productivity, by not making industrial human chicken coop seating available is a no brainer, but it’ll require passions to cool and the elderly CEOs to retire.

Edit: I had a preexisting remote work agreement with this company. As the RTO lockdowns and roundups became more severe (we had a less than 20% compliance rate with the mandate for at least a year), they claimed my RTO agreement hadn’t been properly approved and wasn’t valid. Suddenly I had to come into an office where I didn’t work with anyone locally, everyone I worked with was in Europe or NYC and I was on the west coast so had to go into the office at 4am to start my zoom meetings (I usually started at 5am at home, rolling out of bed and logging in), etc. I did the only honorable thing and write a widely distributed screed about the absurdity of RTO (more impactful when a senior dude does that), and quit immediately. I got a much better job at a late stage startup with no RTO policy, pays better better work, and the people I work with are happy and productivity.

1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time).

2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager.

Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.

And it depends on the company, but software is already heavy on metrics. Scrum is basically one giant dev productivity tracker hilariously sold as being for the benefit of the team.