Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses

Companies Issuing RTO Mandates 'Lose Their Best Talent': Study (arstechnica.com) 96

Posted by BeauHD from the actions-have-consequences dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 "high-tech and financial" firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded. The paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain [PDF], comes from researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The study, which was published in November, spotted this month by human resources (HR) publication HR Dive, and cites Ars Technica reporting, was conducted by collecting information on RTO announcements and sourcing data from LinkedIn.

The researchers said they only examined companies with data available for at least two quarters before and after they issued RTO mandates. The researchers explained: "To collect employee turnover data, we follow prior literature ... and obtain the employment history information of over 3 million employees of the 54 RTO firms from Revelio Labs, a leading data provider that extracts information from employee LinkedIn profiles. We manually identify employees who left a firm during each period, then calculate the firm's turnover rate by dividing the number of departing employees by the total employee headcount at the beginning of the period. We also obtain information about employees' gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees' skill level."

There are limits to the study, however. The researchers noted that the study "cannot draw causal inferences based on our setting." Further, smaller firms and firms outside of the high-tech and financial industries may show different results. Although not mentioned in the report, relying on data from a social media platform could also yield inaccuracies, and the number of skills listed on a LinkedIn profile may not accurately depict a worker's skill level. [...] The researchers concluded that the average turnover rates for firms increased by 14 percent after issuing return-to-office policies. "We expect the effect of RTO mandates on employee turnover to be even higher for other firms" the paper says.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Companies Issuing RTO Mandates 'Lose Their Best Talent': Study More

Companies Issuing RTO Mandates 'Lose Their Best Talent': Study

Comments Filter:

  • The hype cycle is a flat circle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @06:04PM (#65020601)
    Need talent to make money, jack up salaries and perks and anything else you can to compete for talent. Make money off talent, but need higher stock price. Cut perks, salaries, fire people, make work insufferable, stock price goes up. Don't have any talent now, revenue goes down, stock price goes down. Need talent to make money...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      but then you have trashed your rep and nobody with talent will come work for you. I get constant interview requests by amazon who even before the RTO mandate is known to be a meat grinder. And also facebook who very publicly screw over their employees among others. I laugh every time I get them.
      • That's when you rebrand!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Probably. You will still only get young and inexperienced people. The rest will remember. Unless your product is crappy and you compete on price (or you have a monopoly), this is not a sustainable strategy. To be fair, lots of enterprises have crappy products.

  • When you force someone to come to work... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @06:12PM (#65020623)

    ...the only people who will come to work are the impostor syndrome ones.

    The knowledgeable ones, those who share, those who work, those you can count on, those who DO instead of WATCH... they're applying elsewhere.

    Go for it, Musk, Bezos, Trump, and other obscenely rich idiots. MAKE US COME BACK TO THE OFFICE and watch what losers you end up with.

    In school we're judged based on our exam grades.
    In work we're judged based on our work product.

    It takes a REALLY STUPID IDIOT to suggest that we must be in the same office to accomplish any of that.
    Yes, synergies do exist, and they don't exist 40 hours a week.

    • How do you know that?

      • Perhaps he read the study

        • Except the government is different in some aspect. Their best are working on classified systems and it is unlikely they have been working from home; the other is the government still has a pension and like that report mentions the best are more older people and they are more likely to stick around for the pension and other retirement benefits.
          On the otherside if DOGE does push for and get cutting of slots they are going to be the first to leave.

          • Their best are working on classified systems and it is unlikely they have been working from home

            Some take a pile of classified material home then and leave the folders lying around where anyone can see them. Having said that I don't think they'd qualify as "the best".

          • "Government" really depends on what, specifically, you are actually talking about.

            Do you mean government employees, or contractors? Do you mean with, or without a security clearance? All of these things substantially affect what you get paid, and how onerous the terms of employment are. And in the larger picture of "government" employees, do you mean federal, state, county, or local positions? I think it's clear we're talking about federal here, but I just wanted to throw some more complexity which exists i

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

              "Most actual government employees are not paid very well. "

              Meanwhile, average Federal Salary: $106,462 a year...

              Uh huh. Not paid very well are they. Of course, they don't have health insurance or pensions or anything like that either...

              • average Federal Salary: $106,462 a year...

                What's the median? IDGAF about averages. I also see this claim made all over the place and the usually uncredited source seems to be ZipRecruiter [ziprecruiter.com], and:

                1) they are basing this on job postings and don't show their math.
                2) On the same page where that claim is made, there is a section "What are Top 5 Best Paying Related Federal Employee Jobs in the U.S." and the annual salary for the top one they list is $70,123. The text says "Analyzing similar jobs related to the Federal Employee job category, we found five t

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

                  As of December 2024, the median salary for a federal employee in the United States is $79,386. - ChatGPT

                  $80K isn't too bad for a median.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

                  So, what is your reply now? 80K a year median, since you DGAF about averages?

                  How is that for you?

                  Has this new fact changed your position? If so why not?

              • The median salary is less than 80 grand, and given a lot of those jobs are in DC neither the average nor median are particularly impressive. You could make tens of thousands more elsewhere with a third less cost of living.

                Nobody goes into government work for the money. The hours maybe, but never the money.

        • Pray tell which study that is and do explain how the statistics prove that those working from home work nonstop.
            • From the source âoeThere are limits to the study, however. The researchers noted that the study "cannot draw causal inferences based on our setting." Further, smaller firms and firms outside of the high-tech and financial industries may show different results. Although not mentioned in the report, relying on data from a social media platform could also yield inaccuracies, and the number of skills listed on a LinkedIn profile may not accurately depict a worker's skill level.â Thatâ(TM)s my po

              • One study doesn't itself prove anything. But it's also the conventional wisdom. Also, there are lots of reasons why an employee might consider moving on, but unless they are a low performer you definitely want to dissuade them from doing it for any reason really since you inevitably lose institutional knowledge that way. Only when you have the most interchangeable cogs do you not care if you have turnover.

        • Linked in plus buzzwords == "best talent" (Score:5, Insightful)

          by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @08:56PM (#65021029)

          Perhaps he read the study

          No. If he had read the study he would have known that "best talent" means some one who has a linked in profile and creates a long list of skills, ie everything they ever touched however briefly and shallowly. That latter is for recent grads desperate to differentiate from other recent grads. Hoping their elective class choices better fit the job than the other candidates.

          Actual highly skilled workers severely prune that list, listing as only things they'd consider using again. Dropping crap they never want to touch again. Using their focused skill list to deter places they would not be happy at from considering them.

        • If that's true, what's he doing on Slashdot???

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ukoda ( 537183 )
      Seen it first hand where a company wanted to make major employment condition changes so they disestablished all dev jobs and made people apply for their own job with poorer conditions. Those who did not apply got a decent severance package. The people who were confident in their skills and marketability took the money. The less skilled workers agreed to the new conditions. A great way to lose your best talent. I took the money and used to move to a city with better employment opportunities.

      This RTO

      • Re:When you force someone to come to work... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by locofungus ( 179280 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @04:42AM (#65021627)

        The people who were confident in their skills and marketability took the money. The less skilled workers agreed to the new conditions.

        This has played out time and time again. Funnily enough, I thought it was a thing of the past but obviously "lessons will be learned" is trumped by "history doesn't repeat but it rhymes"

        During the 2007/8 financial crisis, entire departments were closed en mass. There was little planning to this, if you were in a department that got axed you were out, if you were in one that was kept, you stayed. This does make sense from an employment law perspective, if you shut an entire department then it's hard(er) for people to argue that there was discrimination.

        I was working for one of the rare companies that were hiring during this period and there were some fantastic people looking for jobs because they just happened to be in the wrong department at the wrong time. (There was also a lot of dross - there were still people around who were hired during the dotcom bubble because they could spell their name)

        Companies privately, if not publicly, acknowledged this mistake of letting some very good people go and it was noticeable that in the later downturns, there was a certain amount of "restructuring" before closing departments. The one or two top people in a department would move into a different department and then six months later the axe would come down on the rest of the department. This time pretty much the only rare gems amongst the CVs of the "been laid off" were the ones where the entire company had failed.

        This time around it's (presumably) different in that people aren't being forced out, they're being "encouraged to decide to quit" - which is, in the short term, much cheaper for the company. I don't do enough interviewing now to have a statistically significant sample but my gut feeling is that the average quality of people looking to move jobs is higher than it was 12-18 months ago.

    • Or rather, the only people who will come to the office are those who want to and those who could not find another, remote-only job.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      ...the only people who will come to work are the impostor syndrome ones.

      The knowledgeable ones, those who share, those who work, those you can count on, those who DO instead of WATCH... they're applying elsewhere.

      Go for it, Musk, Bezos, Trump, and other obscenely rich idiots. MAKE US COME BACK TO THE OFFICE and watch what losers you end up with.

      In school we're judged based on our exam grades.
      In work we're judged based on our work product.

      It takes a REALLY STUPID IDIOT to suggest that we must be in the same office to accomplish any of that.
      Yes, synergies do exist, and they don't exist 40 hours a week.

      I agree with what you're saying but that isn't impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is when you doubt your own abilities or accomplishments, you don't feel good enough to be where you are, like you don't deserve it. Its a problem with self doubt, not actual ability.

      The people rushing back to the office, supporting RTOs are as you describe, people who aren't particularly good but know enough to be able to hide amongst those who are.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. But look at companies with crappy products, like Microsoft, Boeing, Intel, Crowdstrike, Tesla, most "security" software and appliance vendors, etc. etc.

      You can still make a lot of money with basically incompetent employees. Obviously, at some point, your enterprise will die deservedly. But until then ...

  • Like we told them. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @06:22PM (#65020655)
    By making me go back to the office I lose 2 hours a day from my life. They are not paying me for those 2 hours. So effectively it is a pay cut. Fortunately my employer realized saving $30K a month on rent gives us a significant competitive edge.
  • My MSlinkedIn profile is at least a couple years out of date, so the skills won't be accurate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

      It was kind of a weird revelation. I’d been using Linkedin more as a historical “resume” listing a ton of jobs from way way back in time. After getting the nth job description with ‘Windows required’, I basically converted my Linkedin profile to be an actual resume. I have a ‘Technical Resume’ that lists all the jobs, skills, training, and tools I’ve used since I started way way back.

      It hasn’t really changed the emails I get with the stupidest job descri

  • Losing Best Talent = Losing Largest Salaries (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @07:01PM (#65020789)

    And we all know that losing the largest salaries is the bast way to show the investors that you're focusing on the near-term profits. This is what is known in modern business as a win. There can be no negative consequences for a win. Who cares if you've damaged the company for the future. The future doesn't exist on the spreadsheets that show next quarter's profits. WOO HOO! CAPITALISM!

    For the best talent though? It really is a win. They get to move on to a company that will value them today. Sure, that new place will cease to value them in a few years when they're looking to cut costs for near-term profits, but the talent can move on again. Let short-term focused companies flounder as they will. They deserve what's coming to them.

    • A law requiring Directors to always maximize shareholder value over all other concerns is not a function of capitalism, that's socialism.

      Shareholder lawsuits should be abolished. Selling the shares or ballot questions should be your only recourse short of fraud.

      That's what you're looking for and it's much less government control of the economy.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "A law requiring Directors to always maximize shareholder value over all other concerns is not a function of capitalism, that's socialism." If you had said "stakeholder value" I might agree with you, but you've got to do some Olympic-level gymnastics to divorce profit being the primary motive of capitalism.

      • I fail to see how maximizing shareholder value in any way shape or form has anything to do with the workers owning or controlling the means of production.

        Sounds like you're using the "Government doing anything I dislike" definition of socialism, which is fucking stupid given socialism didn't exist until the mid-19th Century..

        It's all the more dumb because you're literally using it to describe capitalism - the means of production being in service only to serve the owner class, which is what shareholders are.

    • Err no not at all. In fact some of the largest talent may be the people who have been at your company the longest and know it the best. These are usually cheaper than any potential replacement due to market rates outpacing pay rises in virtually all industries. The most expensive talent is that which jumps between companies. That may or may not be the "best" talent.

  • They don't care (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @07:02PM (#65020793)
    the workers still gotta work, and there's been so much market consolidation odds are they're gonna go walk right over and work for another company owned by them and their 0.1% buddies.

    My kid ran into this in their field. 80% of the market is owned by 1 company and the remaining 20% are tiny businesses that pay even worse, so there's no way to get ahead.

    Meanwhile RTO keeps property values for commercial real estate up, which is what really matters.

    This is a "House Always Wins" situation.

  • RTO mandates are stealth layoffs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @07:18PM (#65020835)
    And the good employees know it, and they know they’re employable elsewhere. It doesn’t take a genius to predict what happens next.

    When the executives do an RTO, they’re betting that enough poor-performers will leave to offset the loss in productive ones. Very few employees are actually mission-critical, and those will be quietly approached by management and offered a retention bonus, or maybe just permission to keep workong from home, if that’s what it takes to keep them. There’s no law stating that company policy must be uniformly-enforced.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ukoda ( 537183 )
      Yes, I would bet there is some of that "quietly approached by management" happening, as that happened to me in a similar situation. I left anyway.

  • Employers are less interested in top talent than in brown-nosers. If RTO makes top talent quit, the employers will be even happier.

  • At least in some cases. I had to relocate due to a family emergency. My management chain had no problem with me going remote, they knew I was effective either way. But they weren't allowed to approve it. Fortunately, I was able to transfer to another part of the same company.....but in my old position, I was the one who knew how everything worked, the force multiplier who kept everyone else from wasting time figuring out what I already knew. In my new role I don't have that yet. So, I'm definitely less valu

  • No Substance - Ars Technica Clickbait (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The "study" seems to be mostly data mining within a very limited universe. Its dressed up to provide some interesting conclusions, but I wouldn't make much of them. If I were a manager considering RTO I wouldn't pay much attention to it. Managers know exactly who they are losing, they don't need a study to tell them. And they probably have a pretty good idea of the value of those people to the company compared to a replacement, however they choose to assess that value.

    I think often the motive for getting

  • "The Best Talent" have never been bound by the rules that the rest live by. No one told "the best talent" that they had to return to the office and work in an open floorplan hot-desk environment with the plebs. Truly talented people are given whatever it takes to keep them happy and productive. You do not kill the golden goose.

    These companies may have lost access to a wide variety of moderately talented employees who were willing to prioritize comfort over career advancement -but that is not the same thi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      You do not kill the golden goose.

      You sure do... if you are stupid and shortsighted, which is what RTO policies are being argued to be.

      • In stories featuring a goose that lays golden eggs, 100% of the time the goose is killed. The purpose of the story is to try to convince idiots not to, but idiots then and now think they know better.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          That is the actual moral: Idiots very often think they are actually smarter than everybody else. The modern version of the story is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

  • Lame methodology (Score:4, Insightful)

    by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @08:06PM (#65020925)

    I was very much ready to raise my hand and say, "See, I told you so. " But this is not the study for that. I mean this part, give me a break.

    "...employees' gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees' skill level."

    There are so many issues with that being a 'proxy for skill level'. Not even worth a RTFA mention.

    It would be nicer if the academic community spent more time, on more thorough research, versus the churning out of mediocre work. And more time on validating others research results. Big believer in academic pursuits, but as we all know the incentives are now so messed up, the results are often of little value.

    • I haven't looked at my LinkedIn page for several years... but, last time I did, it appeared other people had declared that I possess quite a few skills that aren't really part of my job or anything I'd done in the past.

  • Pre-pandemic, there were already RTO mandates, or rather traditional come to the office expectations. However, the more important and hard to replace workers could always negotiate exceptions. That has always been the case. My guess is the current blanket RTO mandates only apply to not so important and not so hard to replace workers. And this is exactly the same it has always been. For the important workers, they will always gets the same exceptions that they always received.

    • Re:Do companies have true blanket RTO mandates? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pentium100 ( 1240090 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @03:24AM (#65021547)

      Pre-pandemic, there were already RTO mandates, or rather traditional come to the office expectations.

      And the pandemic showed that a lot of jobs can actually be done remotely so there's no real need for those employees to come to the office, live close to the office (and likely pay more for rent) or spend time driving to/from the office.
      Pre-pandemic if you asked to be be allowed to work remotely, the answer would likely be "no" with the reason being "this is how it's done", "you can't really work from home" or something else that would sound plausible. But now the counter-argument is "but we have worked remotely for x months and you ragged that the company has made more profit in that time than before".

  • Duh (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @07:46AM (#65021837)

    Seriously. And even if you exclude the best people from the RTO, many of them (most?) will still leave.

  • I'm watching an RTO order go in for next year at my employer, and I'm pretty certain it's a layoff by another name. Meanwhile severance packages are being offered to senior workers. We'll know more by summer.
  • The c-suite executives believe what they want to. They believe everyone is a replaceable cog because they want to. They hire cheaper short term contract labor because they believe it's no different than long term employee's except cheaper. They now earn so much that they see their laborers as much less than they are. They are the new "nobility" and the rest of us are their surfs (in their eyes). Plus they don't worry about long term anything, as they are normally short term anyway. CEOs don't stay 10-30 yea

  • This is going to sound like I'm trolling. I'm not, or at least I'm going to troll as little as possible. The vast majority of dev jobs are CRUD ones. Sometimes the data model is astonishingly complicated... but ultimately that's an exposure problem. Mid tier folks can do it. Most companies can absorb the loss of their very best because they aren't actually asking them to contribute at the level they're capable of. If you lose a great talent who was doing mundane tasks, you didn't lose anything.

    If you are im

Slashdot Top Deals

One possible reason that things aren't going according to plan is that there never was a plan in the first place.

Close