2024 was the year of the RTO mandate – 2025 will be worse

It feels like barely a month went by last year without some form of public spat between staff and employers over remote working policies.

Indeed, 2024 was the year of the return-to-office (RTO) mandate, with a host of big tech firms pulling the rug out from under staff and forcing them back to the office.

Chief among these RTO zealots was Dell Technologies and Amazon, with the latter having imposed a full return to the office five days a week. CEO Andy Jassy justified the move under the auspices of improving workforce collaboration and team synergy.

“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote in a letter addressed to employees.

“I’ve previously explained these benefits, but in summary, we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”

A long-winded justification complete with all the usual tropes from executives looking to return to a time long passed. They conveniently forget the record-breaking profits during a period of fully remote working.

Perhaps the lavish office spaces they’ve spent billions of dollars on are starting to get dusty.

Naturally, Amazon employees weren’t exactly delighted with the company-wide mandate. An anonymous survey signed by hundreds of staff showed widespread disapproval for the move, but the company is charging ahead full-steam nonetheless.

It’s this aspect of the RTO debate that’s so frustrating and will continue to sow discontent in 2025. Dell Technologies wasn’t dissuaded from its own plans despite clear pushback from employees and the impact it had on morale.

Executives want a return to the status-quo, so surefire in their belief that pre-pandemic working practices will be the key to eking out every last penny during what has been a challenging economic period.

A complete disregard for the myriad of readily available studies highlighting the perils of RTO mandates shows the clear disconnect between the average worker and those running the show. Any failure, stutter, or penny lost can’t possibly be due to the failings of leadership – instead we're told it’s down to Joe or Jane Bloggs in marketing working from their home office.

Eric Schmidt’s infamous Stanford University interview perfectly encapsulated this disconnect when claiming Google’s performance in the AI race was due to remote working practices. He retracted his comments, but his comments laid bare the views of many in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Staff at key competitors in the industry aren’t forced to adhere to rigid working policies, so what’s the secret to their continued productivity and success?

Ulterior motives

There are of course more underhand aspects of the RTO debate that need to be addressed; namely the attempt to push staff out to cut costs.

Big tech started 2023 with a horrendous wave of layoffs, with thousands of roles cut across the industry globally, and the year itself continued in that vein, eventually reaching several hundred thousand.

Most hoped that 2024 would be a calmer year, but it was far from it, with another wave of mass layoffs. While not quite at the scale seen in the year prior, the cuts this year have been very deep as enterprises look to continue shedding weight and reducing costs.

Efficiency and streamlining have been the key motivations behind layoffs, but they can only go on for so long before workforce morale plummets and, crucially, investor confidence dips. With that in mind, creating a working environment so frustrating and restrictive to staff seems like a great way to push them out and cut costs further.

It all sounds very tinfoil hat, I know, but research in October this year revealed that pushing staff out through RTO mandates has become a go-to practice among a concerningly large portion of business execs.

The study, from BambooHR, found 18% of HR professionals and 25% of VP and c-suite executives hoped RTO mandates would prompt voluntary turnover.

In the event that turnover didn’t reach satisfactory levels, more than one-third (37%) of directors, managers, and executives actively planned layoffs because fewer people than expected quit.

No light on the horizon, except for workers who jump ship

While 2024 was a troubling year for remote and hybrid workers the world over, next year will likely be worse. Business executives dipped their toes in the water this year, testing the limits of staff and their willingness to fight for more flexible working conditions.

Many tech employees put up a good fight, and more continue to do so. But with major brands charging ahead regardless and forcing staff back to the office, this will likely embolden other hesitant executives worried about causing a ruckus.

If they can do it, why can’t you? Go on, get them back to the office so you can get those creative juices flowing.

It will, research shows, likely come back to bite them. All that collaboration and team synergy will be rendered pointless when their top talent begins looking for alternative options that suit their needs.

Researchers at Stanford University recently found that firms with rigid RTO mandates typically lost their best-performing staff as a result. Senior employees and women were among those most likely to quit, the study noted.

Losing out on crucial talent while battling away in an increasingly competitive business landscape could be disastrous for many enterprises. But they’ve dug their own grave here in a bid to return to the glory days of the pre-pandemic grind.

AWS chief executive Matt Garman boldly suggested that employees unhappy with the company’s RTO mandate could always quit.

“There are other companies around,” he said. Many executives pushing for an RTO will learn that the hard way.