I once booked a cruise from England. The sales guy was working from a home near the beach in Florida.

" unalienable Rights, that among these are Life², Liberty¹ and the pursuit of Happiness³. "

... "it is a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance. ... Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations."

COVID taught everyone that working from home was possible. No company went under because their workers were not on site.

Now, you try to find excuses and brute-forcing your way back to pre-COVID, but it ain't gonna work. Your employees have a taste of the WFH crack and they're not going to forget it.

Neither will they forget that they did their jobs just fine and the company continued chugging along and even turning benefits.

So sell your expensive offices with their empty cubicles, set up a small, plush office for yourself and the secretary you bang, and leave well alone.

Find another status symbol.

It's going to vary from business to business. If your company does retail, it needs employees to show up. If it makes widgets, it likely requires some live humans in the widget foundry to handle deliveries and make sure the machinery is working properly. But a lot of jobs really can be done remotely and it seems kind of dumb not to do them remotely. Why add to your costs and aggravate the staff by requiring them to show up at an office? Of course it requires skills to do that properly. If you lack those skills maybe you ought to consider acquiring them or maybe it's time to retire.

People who have to commute also should be in favour of RTO. Our public transport is not built for the volume of people it has to serve. So more people stay home, more pleasant journeys for others.

plush office for yourself and the secretary you bang

You might have inspired many CEOs to turn unused conference room into a dungeon.

Considering how many managers have taken a view that they own: my health[1], my time out of work[2], my creative output outside of work[3]; I find it of no surprise that the RTO mandate is pushed. After all, few things reinforce the ownership of a company over a worker than sitting in an office, looked over by the manager.

Saying workers can guess the stated reason doesn't mean they agree with it.

[1] Managers have consistently pushed people to come to the office when they know those people are contagious and there are others with serious health problems in the office

[2] Managers trying to require not just 40 hours, but 45 or more as "expectation of a knowledge worker". To the point that nine hours a day, working, is expected by many managers (in addition to any off-hours work for changes or incidents, with no comp time for that extra time)

[3] Despite pre-declaring ownership of creative material, I've seen more than one company attempt to claim they somehow owned works and material created before I ever worked for them, just because I continued creating, having filled out the disclosure forms that it was a "prior invention"

Companies claim that employees are hesitant to adopt the new RTO mandates despite a VERY expensive contractor-created study showing that in-office workers live in a magical land of happiness and fulfillment twixt the chocolate trees and orange juice rivers, while the grumpy and unwashed remote worker has thunderclouds over their head and a perpetual frowny face. Experts argue that leadership needs to "raise the stakes of the narrative" to drive their RTO goal.

Fortune 500 companies have responded by hiring another contractor to introduce & familiarize employees with the dancing musical animals that will brighten up their workday, but that instantly expire as soon as they are removed from a corporate office setting and are therefore not available to remote holdouts.

Some managers have reasoned that it costs $$$ and impacts their bonuses for those mostly empty offices. So the options are to downsize the office. Or you get bums in seats. Or you office share.

All of them have their own issues, but bums in seats is the least fuss and risk, and may even be cheaper than the alternatives.

Employees don't care: Those who like working from home don't have to suffer the office commute, nor the distractions and disturbances common to the office. Those who already work from the office may actually prefer that it's quieter without so many people around. I'm in the latter camp, but I live near the office so the commute is a nice walk, or bike ride in.

Don't forget that when WFH, manager is just a square. It is unbearable for their egos.

Partner: "Are you really a manager? You are just sitting whole day in the kitchen. Can you move your laptop? I need to prep a dinner. Your little presentation can wait."

"...magical land of happiness and fulfillment twixt the chocolate trees and orange juice rivers"

Yikes. Chocolate and orange juice. Not a combo I would have chosen to represent the ideal. :)

Maybe it's just me. Cold pizza and orange juice for breakfast, OTOH...

The official reasons for RTO - “culture,” “oversight,” “collaboration” - are corporate fairy tales. The real beneficiaries aren’t companies or employees but landlords desperate to rescue their bad office investments, coffee chains craving morning queues, and investment funds terrified of vacancy rates. Dragging people back is basically an extra tax on workers’ time, wallets, and mental health.

The office itself is a relic of the 70s and 80s, when you couldn’t fit a mainframe into your spare bedroom. That’s no longer true. Today, being forced to commute just to sit on Zoom calls from a different postcode is absurd.

And let’s be blunt: a big chunk of RTO is about managers. At home, they’re nobodies. Just another square on the screen. In the office, they get to cosplay as generals, strutting up and down the floor like they’re leading an army. They feed on proximity - watching employees, overhearing conversations, sniffing perfumes in the lift, mistaking surveillance for leadership. It’s ego, it’s voyeurism, and it’s creepy. Their “culture” is really just a thin excuse to reassert dominance, because without an office full of captives, they’re irrelevant.

The truth: workers don’t need offices to do their jobs. Managers and landlords need offices to feel important and to protect their shaky investments. Everyone else is just footing the bill.

Companies could save themselves a good deal of cost by getting rid of the managers who depend on a sea of occupied chairs. Just retain those who can manage remote working. It would save more if they could get rid of the big offices but in a lot of cases they're tied to them by contract or maybe eve own them and can't offload them.

The company for which I work had a ten-year lease on a big office, with hundreds of desks, which was kitted out at the time with a shiny paint job, corporate slogans on the walls, breakout rooms (which nobody used, because if you were playing PONG, you obviously didn't have enough work to do) when we moved in. This year, the lease was up for renewal. Guess what? Our office is now a co-working space with other companies with seats for twelve bums at a time. I've not even been to the new location yet. I may never, given that the vast majority of my day job involves sitting in front of a screen that is hosting a remote desktop session to another virtual machine on "the cloud", and other people yabbering around me are nothing more than an annoying distraction, and certainly not "collaborators," or engaged in some sort of magical "culture".

AC, because this probably identifies me to my employer.

Not only is that a brain-dead term, it's nothing new.

I wasn't the only one who refused "management" roles. I remember one older guy I worked with shocked I "had no ambition". That was very close minded. I did have ambition, and expanded my range, responsibilities, and financial rewards through becoming a better techie.

I had the job I loved. Why would I want to turn into some stuffy suit?

And I would fall into the category of Gen X.

Edit: I must add, in my last long term salaried job, I did become "manager" when the boss was away. I said I didn't mind doing it, as long as they understood I'd be crap at it. It was weird having older people asking me for days off - I just said yes to everything.

More importantly, it said a lot about the state of our team when I was considered the best substitute when the boss was away!

It certainly isn't new. My did resisted promotion to foreman and that was a long time ago. It's a completely unhinged notion that just because somebody's good at one thing they must be good at another. If you don't see the (lack of ) logic in promoting a bean counter to chemist why don't you see the same in promoting a chemist to manager?

"it said a lot about the state of our team"

It might have said they were all techies like you.

"A quarter have indulged in "work to rule" doing only what's in their job description. A fifth indulge in clock blocking and calendar blocking, filling out diary time to avoid meetings. And 17 percent are "task masking," or making an effort to appear busy when they're not. Other wheezes include hushed hybrid, quiet quitting, unbossing and quiet leave."

So, exactly the same that folks have been doing in the office for generations. Nothing special about RTO from the point of view.

Yeah, except there is no time wasted having a natter with your cow-orkers in the kitchen whilst making a cuppa, or getting distracted by Loud Alan on the phone on the other side of the office, or having to sit through a tirade from your dissatisfied colleague at the next desk, etc. etc.

I'm sure my employer has a very nice office but it's over 200 miles from me so I won't be commuting, ever.

One of my colleagues spends half the year in Spain and the other half in the UK, where he also lives over 100 miles from the office. He'd retire (again I suspect) rather than change.

Fortunately our managers like to work from home too.

"Over 90 percent of workers surveyed said they would "take action"

Can we start seeing surveys about how many do actually take action ? Folks can moan and whinge and complain, and they will, but RTO is here to stay. And the number of days in the office will only increase. And the number of jobs offering fully remote will continue to drop.

When we had RTO imposed we had loads of folks threaten to leave, then they looked at the job market, tried applying for the few available, and are still here.

What do think will happen if and when the job market picks up?

Ah, that'll be in a different quarter so doesn't affect today's decisions.

Manglement want more people in the office. And more and more manglement want it more and more, so even when the market picks the jobs will be in the office most of the time. For the foreseeable future (years probably) working in the office some of the time is here to stay, and never working in the office will become as rare as rocking horse poo.

Roll on retirement in a couple of years

When I left a position, the RTO pressure was one of the factors in that decision. I suspect that's how it is for others too - it's not the only reason. The point is that it needn't have been a factor.

IMO I was more effective at home, where it was quieter and with fewer distractions, than when I was in the office. I also had no problem going in to the office, if it was needed. My objection was being pressured to go in for a fixed number of days, for no defined benefit.

That said, the WFH could have been handled better. If a company wants to develop a sense of team/community then they should make time for social calls - not just formal meetings. It's often during social chats that work stuff crops up in different ways, where it might become clear that one team member can help another, having not otherwise appreciated the need or matching resource. There isn't a need for such chats to be around the same physical kettle.

What we're seeing is employers using the softer labor [sic] market to push for more face-to-face time, whether that's to encourage collaboration, rebuild office culture, or simply because they feel they can," said Jack Kennedy, Senior economist at Indeed.

Ah yes, those two, "collaboration", the thing that now happens entirely via tools such as Teams and Slack, and is not face-to-face, and "office culture" which is another term for the toxic workplace environment where bullying and stress thrive.

Neither of these things are tangible, measurable outcomes, and when they are brought out, it is always a clear proxy for what the bosses actually mean: presenteeism and employee surveillance, with just a hint of middle managers justifying their own existence and building their own little empires.

Here's a crazy thought: rather than dictating a one-size-fits-all policy and making up rationalisations for it, perhaps see what allows your employees to thrive, and what enables them to be the most productive. For some people, that is five days a week in the office, and for others, it is none. "Collaboration" and "office culture" are just meaningless shibboleths of the management class. In a rational world, employers would recognise that many employees do much better, and work much better, without a commute and forced presence in a hostile open plan disease-factory.

'We know what you're selling, and we're not buying it..."

And the unbossing thing is not a a new concept. My former employer (I'm retired now) to their great credit created a new job title, a new role, a new space in the org chart, and facilitated a corresponding salary bump in order to recognise my contribution (and level of seniority) after I repeatedly declined management track promotions. Management is a discrete specialism requiring its own specific set of abilities and talents which I acutely aware of not possessing...

... people like to work from home. So do I.

But when you're working on serious projects, video conferencing and phone calls just don't hack it.

You need the team cohesion that comes with actually being in the same room with a team.

You can't "read the room" on video - a lot of people don't get how much body-language matters.