Why Companies Are FORCING Return-To-Office

0:00 I just found out about a fairly large organization that's going to be requiring back to the office 4 days a week. What? In the year of our Lord 2025, 4 days a week. That is simply a good way to get people to quit. >> Which I feel like is kind of the elephant of the room of return to office. Like it's going to get people to quit. I'm pretty sure that's the point. Layoffs make people angry. But if you force return to office for company culture, well then you're not laying anyone off. They're quitting. Now I'm actually a proponent of inoff days. I do think it fosters community and creativity and it's great for strategizing but for overall productivity absolutely not. At most you need like 2 days a week in office maybe

0:47 if that but in 2025 when we are fully set up to work remotely 4 days a week is just egregious. I mean maybe they need to do a riff and it's cheaper to get people to quit than it is to lay them off. If a company is failing and they think that part of the problem is that employees are working from home, that is a leadership problem because there is no difference with me clicking buttons here at my desk at home and clicking buttons here at my desk in a cubicle. Except in the cubicle I have to listen to the person next to me chewing ice all day long. If I remember in my last office job that I had, I would go into the office and I would work on my computer, wouldn't talk to anyone, and then I would have meetings with clients and all of those would be on Zoom. And the one manager that was also on the meetings would be in his office also on Zoom. We weren't even in the same office cuz we didn't have a conference room at that old place. So, it's just like why am I

1:32 here? And there was one time where the office had to go through a renovation. So, I was forced to work from home and nothing changed. >> The company is not as productive as they want. It's because leadership is not holding their employees accountable. And that can be done remotely. It's just classic corporate America for leadership at the top of a big corporation like this to acknowledge that they might be the problem. They need to hold on to that power. So they blame everybody at the bottom and they would rather uproot all of their lives, make them totally lose the flexibility that they've had, sit in rush hour traffic twice a day to go click buttons in a different building than they would take accountability for their own actions. I would love an office to go to twice a week. I work from home. I don't have an office that I could go to and I do miss that. But to ask people to come in four days a week is simply out of touch.

2:18 >> And I agree. I think one or two days a week in the office would actually be best. I like my job. I like my co-workers. It makes sense. Plus, if going into the office is optional, then the only people you're interacting with are the people that want to be there, which automatically makes the whole office environment just better. If you're a company and think that people are being lazy because they're working from home, just fire those people. And if you think everyone's being lazy while they're working from home, then set productivity standards for everybody. And if people don't meet them, then fire those people. Leave the people alone that are meeting standards of productivity that are making your company money. >> Our quote return to office for um my section of business was for 4 days a week, which is basically full-time. >> Mhm. >> It does sound like they are still giving some people the option to be hybrid or

3:05 remote. I'm not entirely clear on it, but it's highly encouraged to come in 4 days a week. That all being said, I told my boss like I if I select hybrid, am I going to be punished in terms of promotions and all of that? >> The answer was no, but >> I think we'll see. >> I almost guarantee that you'll be more likely to get promotions if you're working in office more. And that one I actually do kind of understand more because you're more likely to promote people that you see and interact with and observe working on a day-to-day basis. I'm not saying that that's how it should be. I'm saying that probably that is going to be how it works, especially if you're a manager and Tom is always in the office working hard and everyone else you just see on Zoom once or twice a day >> and it's not a massive company. Um, it's

3:50 a midsize company for sure. So, I'm hoping that there'll be a little bit more flexibility, especially since I'm like one of two females in the entire company that have three children now. And that's a whole other subject. So many people in my comments are like, "Well, just, you know, quit your job. Like, it's worth it just to stay home." woman that is just honestly not an option. So, we have to deal with the hand that we're adult, you know? >> Yeah. Quitting is such a weird response. Like, oh, if you don't like it, well then just quit and stay home. Like, I can't. That's half the household income gone. Like, all of my finances we built in our budgeting. We built around the expectation that we would have dual income household. Just giving that up simply isn't an option for most people. Just a work from home girly crying because her job announced that they will be returning to office. Yeah, this I get because it does uproot your entire life, especially if you've been remote for

4:37 years. Maybe you've moved, your kids are in a nice school, they've got friends, you've got friends. To go back into office, everything in your life has to uproot and shift to closer to your office. And sometimes that's like states away. It's also just a huge loss of freedom if you're used to that. And that's a really hard transition. >> My company is mandating return to office after many years fully remote. And people want to know why I'm so mad about it. Maybe it's because today I sat in a meeting for over an hour while I listened to the CEO and senior executives brag about record growth, record sales, record everything. Meanwhile, in the past four years, we have only gotten raises for two of those years. Raises that do not keep up with inflation. I was in a meeting with the CEO where he was working remotely from a hotel, but I'm expected to drive over an

5:23 hour every day to do the same clicketity clacking that I can do right here from my house. Bragging about growth is so weird to me. Unless my paycheck is like directly tied to company profits, I really do not care. Give me bonuses based on the growth. Give me raises based on the growth. Give me something to care about based on the growth. But when I hear growth, all I hear is so you're getting paid more, but nothing has changed for me. Oh, and also you're taking away my work from home, which is effectively a pay cut. >> One of those senior executives bragged about all the traveling he's been able to do. Meanwhile, my family is barely scraping by. return to office will cost me and my family over $13,000 a year. It's a pay cut. Continuing the work from home culture that we've had for the entire seven years I've been with this company cost the company literally $0.

6:08 It cost them $0 to keep us happy. But it will cost me $13,000 to commute. So if you're wondering why I'm mad about return to office, this is why. >> I feel like $13,000 is a lot. Maybe she's factoring in child care costs there. That's probably it. But the principle is correct. It costs way more for you to go into office commutes, uh, food, gas, maintenance on your car, child care, your general sanity and happiness. And she said it cost the company $0 to keep them happy, but it actually saves the money to keep them happy. If you're forcing everyone into office, then you have to pay huge amounts of money on prime downtown real estate office space, which is not cheap. But if they're all working from home, then you don't have to pay those high fees. My company, for example, has grown a lot in the last few years that I've been there. But basically, everyone is working remotely, so they haven't had to upgrade any of the office space. And office space is expensive, so they're

6:55 saving a lot of money by keeping employees remote. And also, they've hit their growth goals almost every year. >> Executives have admitted they don't have data to support going back to the office, but uh they're still comfortable having you spend $561 a month on it. Usually, when we see a return to office mandate, they talk about the culture, but here's the thing. When you take away people's flexibility and have them start spending more money on a commute, they end up more burned out and stressed. And that compounds when you add on a commute that's more than 30 minutes. And nothing screams good culture like employees that are completely stressed and burned out. And employers have so much incentive to care about this because uh when they don't, it costs them big time. >> It is so much more stressful to have to commute cuz you have to get up on time. You have to get completely ready. You have to leave on time. Maybe there's traffic. Maybe there's a surprise. You sleep through your alarm. You have to skip breakfast. If you've got kids, you got to get the kids ready. If you've got

7:41 pets, you got to walk them and get them outside before you go. and then they have to spend most of their day in the crate unless you pay for someone to come over during the midday and walk them. When I worked in the office, I was so much more stressed and burned out even though I was doing much less work. At my current job, which is a different job, I do way more work and feel less stressed. I take fewer days off just because I'm generally happier and don't need that break. In any workforce, you generally have three types of people. Those that are engaged, that are not feeling super stressed, and they feel recognized for the work that they do. Our quiet quitters that just show up, do their job, and go home. And then you have the loud quitters who are kind of menaces. They are in their reputation era. This group often intentionally is causing more problems because they feel wronged by the organization. And what causes someone to go from the green to the blue? Well, it's when the trust between employee and employer is severed. And

8:28 nothing severs trust quite like the employer saying, "Hey, we know you've been working from home for 3 years and we've had record profits, but um we don't trust you to do that anymore, so we'd like you to come back to the office and spend your own money on it while you're at it." For those of you who love remote work, don't forget to follow along for all the updates. And if you hate remote work, um, please stop being mean to me. >> Yeah, I guess employee loss of trust is also a big consideration. Don't get me wrong, I don't think companies are for you or have your general welfare in mind. They're companies, they're non-scentient entities that have profits in mind. But if you have a company with good managers that pays you well, treats you well, you're inclined to go above and beyond for them. You like your job, you like your managers, you like your co-workers, you know, everything's good, you get to work from home, something comes up in the evenings, you hop online and take care of it. I've done that before. But when you force people to uproot their lives, you break that loyalty and you're probably never going

9:15 to get it back. Trust is very easy to break and very hard to regain. >> Just informed that work from home is officially ending with my employer. And right along with it, we'll be working after hours. >> No more weekends, no more evenings, no more laptop coming home. >> Yeah. When you do this, you lose employees. You also lose the ones that remain. you lose their goodwill and you lose their willingness to go out of their way for when something comes up that needs to be addressed. And I see a lot of comments like this that say, uh, it's weird how so many people lose their minds over going to work when it's what the entire world did pre2020. It's time to go back to work and stop running errands midday. That's life. And sentiments like that kind of confused me. First of all, about 7% of American workers were remote before the pandemic,

10:01 pre2020. So there was already a way that it worked. I mean, it's not like it was new. It was just new for a lot of people. Second, just because something used to be some way doesn't mean that's automatically better. We used to go work in factories for 12 hours a day, 6 days per week, and then you would die at the age of 40 because of how horribly unhealthy those environments were. Relative to that, going into an office and sitting on your computer seems pretty great. But I'm not advocating that everybody should be forced to go back to like a factory or an agricultural life because that's how it used to be. That doesn't make it better. The idea of progress is that things get better for everybody and remote work is a lot better for most people. So, I just got the dreaded mandatory return to office email. I work for a corporate company and I've been working remote for the last three years and now they're wanting everybody to start coming into

10:48 the office full-time starting in January of 2026. Um, I where I live like to commute to the office would be over an hour and a half outside of the city considering traffic and other things. so far. >> And I have an autistic toddler who has therapies and schooling and everything else set up near my home. So, this is really going to be a big change. Um, and I have until September 1st to make a decision if I'm either going to comply or say goodbye. So, it's a lot of stuff that I have to think about right now. So, wish me luck. Yeah, that's another good point is that this far disproportionately impacts like mothers who have to take care of kids or just caretakers in general. If you've got

11:35 special needs children or elderly relatives or relatives who are disabled and unable to take care of themselves, those people used to be able to work jobs and also be able to take care of the people in their lives that needed taken care of. But if you force return to office, then one, they're no longer able to do that. So now they have to pay for that care. So it's actually effectively a pay cut. You are far increasing their expenses by forcing them to do this. I think this highlights an obvious and major disconnect between employees and employers where the majority of employees want to work either remote or hybrid and the majority of employers want everyone forced back into the office. And obviously because employers have all the power in these negotiations, they are getting their way. But it's creating this huge divide between the people who control the companies and then the people who actually do the work and earn the profit for the company. >> Well, return to office mandates have

12:21 gained some steam this year. 80% of CEOs saying that they believe workers will be in person full-time within the next 3 years. That's according to a KPMG survey. Our very own Carrie Hannon was on the show a few weeks ago to discuss the battle between employees and employers over return to office mandates. And you, our audience, had a lot to say on the subject. She received over 2,000 comments on her article. Back with us, we got Carrie with some more of that feedback. Carrie, what did you hear? >> I imagine they heard a lot. Like everyone has an opinion on this, including me, which I guess is why I'm making this video. So, of course, people are going to speak up. They feel very strongly that everyone should be required to be in office for that good good corporate company culture or corporations should just stay out of people's personal lives and let them do the job that they're hired to do, which is more where I stand. >> Well, hi Brad. Um, yes. I mean, it was

13:08 fantastic. There was so much engagement. Let's say, uh, could we say it's a hot topic? Uh, return to the office. Um, we had, you know, thousands of people commenting and and the gist of it shouldn't be a surprise to most of us. It's that people are saying it's a complete time suck. You're not more productive in the office. You know, and to a sense, you know, to if you think about it, they're right on many levels. There's that commute. There's the cost of gasoline or public transportation. It it's really ownorous uh in many situations. And so there was this whole sense of uproar over, you know, that they're very productive and they need the flexibility. And in fact, and I agree with them, nobody wants to be micromanaged. And the real core issue here, Brad, is trust. They felt that their managers wanted them back in the

13:54 office because they don't trust them. And that's a really tough thing uh in terms of management because that's something you really do need to foster between workers and and their managers. So, I think that's a >> about 75% of my time when I worked in an office was looking busy. That's not counting all of the pointless meetings, emails, and memos that management made me sit through. Yahoo Finance Reader. Yeah, absolutely. There was a lot of studies that came out a few years ago suggesting that something like 40 to 60% of all time spent in office working is spent not doing actual work, walking around, talking to people, etc., etc. Which makes me think what we could either reduce the workday or people can just work from home and work really hard, get their stuff done in however much time it takes, and then you're done. You take the rest of the day off. That's how it worked when I worked for a moving company. Your day was exactly as long as it took you to do all of the moves you had on the schedule. If that

14:41 was a 4-hour day, hey, good for you. You get to go home early. If that was a 12-h hour day, then it was just a 12-h hour day. >> A big piece of it. Um, you know, to be fair, some companies do need people to be back in the office to kind of mingle and inspire, you know, teamwork and stuff. But I mean, the question there is, does it have to be 5 days a week? Um, so that's what what I was hearing. But the funny thing I got to tell you, >> yeah, but like imagine the reverse. Say we live in a world where basically all jobs that can be remote are obviously that's not all of them, but a lot of like white collar office jobs, those are mostly remote. 90% of them are remote. And then a bunch of CEOs or private equity bros get together and they propose in office work which is like something new. Imagine trying to pitch that to a remote first world. Like yeah we take all of these employees who are already doing really well and we force them into the same building in close

15:27 proximity with people that they kind of don't want to be around. And in doing so we force them to pay for more expensive houses because they need to be closer to downtown areas where offices are. We force them to pay more money in child care because of course someone has to look after their kids. They're no longer allowed to do it cuz they're forced in office. We uh force them to pay for commuting costs, gas, maintenance, public transportation, and whatever they have. And we forced them to give up any lives they might have had outside their job. Imagine that flipped scenario. Everyone's remote and you try and pitch in office work. Nobody would go for it. That sounds awful. >> I went back and just looked at the column I wrote this week looking at all these reader comments and we've got over 3,000 comments on this column. So, I mean, it is not going away this issue. >> Look, I love the engagement sticking with the workplace trends. You recently wrote about older generations being

16:13 happiest at work. What can you tell us about that? >> Yes, indeed. This really warms my heart. You know, workers 65 and older, a Pew Research study came out this that that pointed to it came out earlier this week pointing to the fact that this is the happiest group of works workers in the work uh place, this older generation that they feel very highly satisfied with their work. And in fact, there are a couple of reasons for that. They they cite flexibility. They cite the fact that they feel respected at work and that they're not feeling left behind at all. That in fact they feel as they're being offered the educational and the training that they might need to stay in these jobs. And so that's really a great >> and a lot of those people you have to realize have like they have good retirements. They spend years in jobs that probably gave them pensions.

16:58 They've been saving up for years. They probably bought a house years ago. Like if you are in the 65 and older bracket and you've been working your whole life, probably your life has been pretty good. Which to be clear, I'm happy. I'm never going to be upset that people have good lives obviously. But if everything else in your life is going really well, then obviously satisfaction with things like your job would also be high just because if everything's in your life is good, then you're going to be happy with the other things. >> Great sign. The and the reason is this work this segment of the workplace has really been ticking up in recent years as workers are staying on the job longer than that traditional 65 retirement age for a couple of reasons, Brad. They're doing it because they they need the financial security. They want that extra oomph. They're not ready to retire financially. And secondly, they they love what they do. They really enjoy

17:44 their jobs. And I must say, uh, the the group of people that say that they really enjoy their jobs and working is higher than the percentage that says they're only working because they need the money. >> And that's great. If you found something you love with people you love working with and you want to go into office, then I'm happy for you. You should be allowed to do that. But you shouldn't be allowed to force other people into the office because you enjoy the office. It's like how I don't care if you smoke. If you want to smoke, great. You're an adult. Make your own decisions. But I do care if you smoke in a plane right next to me because I'm in a space where I can't be avoided and it directly impacts me with nothing that I can do about it. Now you're forcing me to essentially smoke and I don't want to smoke. You also have to imagine that from a business perspective, it might actually make sense to go fully remote or at least give people the option of remote work because how many good really

18:29 hardworking people out there out there that could help your business thrive that are only willing to work remote or even just don't live near you. If you're located in like, I don't know, Austin, Texas, then yeah, there are a lot of great people in Austin, Texas who can do good work, but there's literally tens of millions of other really well-qualified people that live in the rest of the country that might be able to do better work. So, from an employee level, you're losing out on time, freedom, and also a lot of money because it's expensive to go back into office. And from a company and corporate level, you're losing out on potentially hundreds or thousands of employees that could do really good work and help your company profit. However, as good as I think it is for both companies and employees to encourage remote or at least hybrid work, it does look like the world is shifting away from that. Thanks for watching.