How would that not make top performers want to jump ship? The employees who would struggle in a tight job market are the ones who will end up returning to the office.
So to mitigate that you create exceptions for some employees which means everyone is going into the office yet still conducting all those meetings on Zoom.
My theory is RTO is about satiating a certain type of controlling personality.
[1] https://www.bamboohr.com/resources/data-at-work/data-stories...
if you have PMF, remote is easy because it's pretty clear what makes things grow, and there are clear signals about whether something works. if you don't have it (as a company or dept.), then you need a way to secure your next round of either investment, funding, or budget, all while searching for market fit, and without an external feedback loop from a customer. this is a musical chairs game that requires players to attrit as a way to show progress.
I would argue RTO policies mean your firm doesn't have market fit.
A great counter-intuitive example of this is musk's twitter acqisition where he made people go back to the office, and where actually, twitter didn't have market fit anymore because it was mostly bots, served mainly state interests, and its major advertisers were only paying for brand protection from popular sentiment turning against them, and this was the business model of the safety team. It has users, but it is still looking for real, profitable market fit. All his companies have customers and huge investment, but arguably they are still in early stages looking for PMF.
This is why he needs RTO, whereas it literally doesn't matter if FAANG companies do it because they have PMF and their massive growth phase is behind them. FAANGs should do remote because all their current upside comes from solving optimization problems on their existing revenue streams, where companies with steep growth still in front of them should RTO- with a huge caveat.
The direction of causality matters, where RTO doesn't create growth, but it's what you have to do when you don't have it yet. Remote is suboptimal if you still have your massive growth in front of you, but hyper-efficient if you are in the optimization phase of a company.
But there are also certain companies where there’s less you need to talk about. For example companies or orgs doing fast follows. Once “What we do here” is well defined, let people WFH & work remote, they’ll be able to work it out.
The biggest is overconfidence in AI coding solutions and attempting to replace programmers, while adding a huge expensive dependency on a third party to provide access to the AI models and cloud. It'll be some small schadenfreude consolation when these companies are shaken down by the enshittification of those AI providers.
Because yeah, they say that they are doing all the time. But it's not something simple to do (I'd say "possible", but well...) and I'm yet to see anybody actually explain how.
Somewhere a CXO pat himself because he manage to creat all that through open office and 0 clutter policy cause flexible seat/desk. /S