Companies like Starbucks, Paramount and Microsoft are among the latest to issue new return-to-office requirements, but mass RTO has been a years-long push across Corporate America. Getting workers back in hasn’t been so easy.
People are spending about 25% of their days working from home, and that share hasn’t budged since spring 2023, says Nick Bloom, a Stanford professor and leading researcher on remote work trends, and based on a recurring survey of 10,000 Americans from his team at WFH Research.
Work-from-home rates have persisted, Bloom tells CNBC Make It, even as the labor market sours, people cling to their jobs and leverage swings back in the direction of CEOs making RTO calls.
What gives?
Passive resistance
Bloom points to a few factors. First is a “growing compliance gap.”
“Firms are announcing RTOs,” he says. “It just does not look like employees are following through on the ground.”
He thinks of it as passive resistance: CEOs make a big announcement, but the middle managers tasked with enforcing the rule don’t want to follow it themselves, much less make direct reports do so.
Managers are typically assessed on the performance of their team, and if they’re performing well enough, they’re unlikely to see the benefit of an increased attendance rule, Bloom says. Senior leaders may overlook any rule-bending too.
Many businesses are also shrinking their layers of middle management. This can lead to burnout among the bosses who remain, which in turn can result in less enforcement of these RTO mandates.
Back in the office, but on workers’ terms
Then, there’s the issue of tracking whether people are in for the actual number of days required by company policy.
Take a company that has a four-day office policy, but most people only go in for three. It can be hard to track exactly why someone didn’t meet the attendance requirement for a given week. They could be out taking client meetings, at a conference, at an appointment, taking a sick day or just on vacation, Bloom says.
One Fortune 100 company Bloom spoke with has a three-day attendance policy, but over an eight-week rolling average, they only flag if someone is in fewer than one-and-a-half days per week. The company’s HR chief chalked up the missing in-office time to people being out on business travel, Bloom says.
Other workers are showing up for the required number of days, but experimenting with how long they actually have to be there. Some 43% of hybrid workers partake in coffee badging, or going to the office for a few hours just to show their faces, and 12% want to give it a try, according to Owl Labs’ recent survey of 2,000 full-time workers. Among those who’ve been caught, more than half say their employer didn’t mind the practice.
Coffee badging is down from 2023 levels, but consistent with last year.
The majority of hybrid workers go into the office three to four days a week, which is up from last year, says Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs. At the same time, they’re finding ways to maintain flexibility by coffee badging, scheduling personal appointments during the day, or trying what he calls “micro-shifting” —working in short, non-linear blocks not bound by a 9-to-5 and instead based on personal energy, responsibilities or productivity patterns.
As far as flexibility goes, “they’re finding it wherever they can,” Weishaupt says.
Quitting RTO companies for more flexibility
Workers quit when they don’t get the flexibility they want, or see it being clawed back by their employers, experts say. That could be by design.
“RTO is being used as a bit of a cheap way to reduce headcount” by avoiding layoffs and paying out severance, Bloom says. Quitters could be scooped up by younger, smaller firms that offer flexibility as a perk when they can’t compete with big-company salaries. That could be another reason why work-from-home rates have, on the whole, remained the same.
The problem with using RTO to shrink headcount is “you don’t get to choose who leaves,” Bloom says.
Previous research from the University of Pittsburgh found that women, senior and skilled employees were most likely to leave companies that enacted new RTO policies.
Businesses say offering remote and hybrid work improves their ability to hire, especially for hard-to-fill roles or in so-called “talent deserts” in certain areas of the country, says ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud.
Around 20% of employers say they’re looking to hire fully remote workers this year, and a similar share are on the hunt to hire candidates in a hybrid role, according to ZipRecruiter data.
“There is still demand for these types of roles within companies,” Bachaud says, “but a smaller share than we’ve seen in the past, for sure.”
Want to be your own boss? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How To Start A Business: For First-Time Founders. Find step-by-step guidance for launching your first business, from testing your idea to growing your revenue.
Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life, and request to join our exclusive community on LinkedIn to connect with experts and peers.
