Return-to-Office Mandates: How to Lose Your Best Performers | Brian Elliott

Recent return-to-office ( RTO ) mandates like those at UPS and Boeing have a simple message: Come back to the office five days a week.

There is mounting evidence that mandates don’t improve financial performance.

They damage employee engagement and increase attrition, especially among high-performing employees.

Executive anxiety, monitoring, a lack of trust, and having employees perform to the metric of being in the office all contribute to lower performance.

Forcing people who’ve been effective working from home three or four days a week to commute to the office instead is a recipe for grief.

The group most likely to leave in the face of mandated RTO are high-performing employees.

Mandates and monitoring lead to decreased employee satisfaction, retention issues, and a loss of trust.

Institute for Corporate Productivity research showed that employees at high-performance companies were 11 times more likely to say they had senior leaders and managers who trusted them to do their jobs.

Companies that build trust outperform their peers financially.