Return-to-office mandates don't make companies more profitable

A study shows no significant changes in financial performance and steep declines in employee job satisfaction when workers are forced to go back.

The office landscape was forever changed during the coronavirus lockdown, when workers were forced to shift gears to work remotely from home.

Four years later, companies are still scrambling to put the fragmented pieces back together in an effort to streamline the endeavors of their workforce. Some have shifted to a hybrid model, while other corporations, including Goldman Sachs and AT&T, have issued mandates that their workers return to the office full-time or four days a week — or risk losing their job for noncompliance.

When organizations give their employees the return-to-office ultimatum, they may be motivated in doing so by their bottom line to be profitable. However, a new study by the Katz Graduate School of Business at University of Pittsburgh on return-to-office mandates proves otherwise. The study, which was conducted on Standard and Poor’s 500 firms, found that there are “no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after RTO mandates.” Additionally, the study highlights “significant declines” in employee job satisfaction when demands and threats are placed on workers to report to the office in-person.

The subtext behind some of these mandates is that companies are trying to control their employees by having them within their direct sight and supervision, and under their proverbial thumb once again. In the case of AT&T’s return-to-work mandates issued to 60,000 managers, one manager even argued that the mandates were a thinly veiled disguise for conducting mass layoffs by forcing resignations from thousands of employees who are not able to relocate to the brick-and-mortar office setting.

In an extreme case of throwing down the gauntlet on returning to work in-person gone wrong, CEO Bob Brisco of Internet Brands made a video that went viral before it was removed from the company’s Vimeo page (but it’s still available online elsewhere). In the video, Brisco said, “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point. We’re informing how we need to work together going forward.” He added, “We’re better when we’re together.”