Confirmed: Mandated Return-to-Office = Higher Turnover

For many future years we will read reports and then say, “The pandemic caused that”. Here’s one more.

The forced work-from-home in 2020 and 2021 has led to dreamy work situations for white-collar employees but total drudgery for employers…to the point that we now have two additional immediately-recognizable acronyms: WFH for work-from-home and RTO for return-to-office.

From the employee side, WFH represents options…for when and how to work, for easier child and elder care, and even for which state to live in. For employers, the combination of WFH + RTO = higher turnover, worse recruiting, and for-certain-resulting lower productivity. New reporting tells us this:

• 42% of companies that have mandated RTO saw a higher level of employee turnover than they had anticipated.
• Almost one-third of companies found recruiting got worse.
• And 76% of employees said they would leave if their company forced them to RTO.
• As a final kick, nearly half of candidates said they would reject roles if there is no flexibility.[i]

From the start, forced WFH looked like trouble for employers who had zero choice but to permit it during those pandemic months. One of few expected upsides was that money would be saved via reduced office space, assuming workers would remain at home. And while true for some companies, those non-renewed leases are having a massive negative economic impact on our cities which has yet to fully hit home. And city-based hotels and restaurants are feeling the same whack.

But if there was another employer win from WFH, I can’t see one. Turnover is up and Gallup tells us employee engagement is down for the first time in a decade, saying this specifically about WFH:

The largest decline in employee engagement was among those in remote-ready jobs who are currently working fully on-site — this group saw a decline of five points in engagement and an increase of seven points in active disengagement. It’s worth noting that exclusively remote employees saw an increase of four points in “quiet quitting” (aka not engaged in their work and workplace).[ii]

Some Predict CEOs Will End WFH

Fortune published a recent report predicting CEOs are running out of patience with WFH, citing the following reasons[iii]:

#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees.

#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work.

#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers.

#4: Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely.

I remember two 2021-ish Wall Street Journal articles that nailed the problem. In one a CEO said he could not imagine a recent college grad developing adequately via zoom meetings versus walking the halls with her in-office, more-experienced colleagues. And the other article profiled four employees who had been hired and then quit within six months because zooming alone didn’t help them build relationships with their managers nor their peers.

Yet Employees Have More Power…and Will Continue to Have It Regarding WFH or RTO Decisions

The major obstacle is workers now have the upper hand. That the sheer number of workers across the U.S. cannot meet the demand for filling open jobs, permitting employees to make decisions that severely impact organizations rather than the traditional other-way-around. And the Census Bureau tells us this won’t change anytime soon because our baby boomers are retiring and there just aren’t enough younger workers to take their places.[iv]

The Census Bureau also tells us in the same report that 51% of all new workforce entrants will be immigrants beginning in 2030, and that percentage will increase throughout the foreseeable future. This comes at a time when Americans’ favorable opinion of immigrants continues to go down[v], likely influenced by the continuous streaming of Mexican border stories across TV news as though these are the only immigration examples.

What To Do? Regardless of WFH or RTO or Hybrid, Retention Should be Addressed

CEOs are ultimately deciding their organization’s WFH/RTO strategies, choosing from (1) total WFO, (2) total RTO, or (3) various forms of hybrid scheduling. But among the hundreds of online reports about companies’ decisions, little is said about how those organizations should engage any resulting zoomers in order to retain them…and this is a topic that fits right into our sweetspot. Generic recommendations call for managers to build stronger, more personal relationships with their individual team members, yet those same generic recommendations come up short on how to do this.

As our company has proven for a decade-plus, Stay Interviews provide managers with a structured method to learn their employees’ greatest day-to-day needs and then meet those needs. This specific WFH retention solution is to combine the five Stay Interview questions with skill-building for asking those questions, listening to each employee’s responses, probing to learn more, taking a full page or two of notes, and then building individualized stay plans to retain that employee longer.

Need help establishing retention goals for WFH, RTO, or Hybrid?  
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

The Stay Interview goal is to identify and address work-driven issues versus virtual happy hours and other social activities which fail due to their simplicity, their superficial quality. While helping employees meet their peers virtually is a worthy objective, the absolute most important relationship is the one they develop with their manager…and that manager must have training and tools to lead that relationship.

Improving retention and engagement among WFH employees is a very, very tall task. Training managers to facilitate Stay Interviews on a regular schedule provides the absolute best opportunity to retain and engage them.

[i] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/we-re-now-finding-out-the-damaging-results-of-the-mandated-return-to-the-office-and-it-s-worse-than-we-thought/ar-AA1eDefg?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=1c82f1dc40644b398135a3d0e5745381&ei=16

[ii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/468233/employee-engagement-needs-rebound-2023.aspx?thank-you-subscription-form=1

[iii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bosses-are-fed-up-with-remote-work-for-4-main-reasons-some-of-them-are-undeniable/ar-AA1cyh0l?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6ab063aa84fa4eb5abcae434f66ef879&ei=18

[iv] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.html

[v] https://news.gallup.com/poll/508520/americans-value-immigration-concerns.aspx