It finally happened to you, and now you have questions.
The company you’re having fun working at just dropped an unpleasant surprise on everyone, they’re expecting their staff near the hub areas to return to office on some cadence.
They still value you, they just don’t value you as a remote worker.
For some reason, the culture that developed over the past 5-6 years where most of your company worked primarily remote has been determined to not be the culture the company wants. This is probably happening even as the company reports they’re meeting or beating goals, somehow, and now you’re left confused why anything needs to change.
A vicious cycle has just begun.
Truthfully, you are not going to get any solid answers, because the actual answers don’t align with your company’s self-described values, or “words to live by.”
Because these requirements are often done in a seemingly uncoordinated or disconnected way from how the personnel at your company accomplish their work, you can look forward to a few milestones in the near future.
Actual RTO Milestones
I have never been in the C-suite, or an executive (At this pace I never will be, if only because I don’t think I could abandon my integrity to ask my employees to blindly follow my instruction without any explanation), so I can’t personally comment on what drives this type of initiative.
For those of us in the wide spectrum of employees ranging from support specialists to director and above, actual, repeatable milestones appear in each of these cases.
You may find that some of these milestones contradict your company’s messaging. That is concerning, but all too common.
Let’s begin.
Milestone 1: Candidate pool for open roles shrinks
Your company might have a single office in one hub, or multiple across varied time zones. If you live in America, one place a company loves to have office presence is San Francisco.
For some reason, your company that has enjoyed the largest candidate pool possible on a relatively strict budget now believes that they can afford specialized talent in either…
- An oversaturated, hyper-competitive market (west coast)
- A limited population, or worse, talent-void market
…and hopes they can recruit someone there, or get someone to relocate.
Unfortunately, your company probably isn’t Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Your company likely isn’t even in the Fortune 50. Your company has gone from offering a serious competitive advantage that qualified candidates would consider taking less salary for, to negative competitive advantage that current employees will be repelled by.
The rationale for this is curious; Open roles that you struggled to fill even remotely will now languish in perpetuity due to low budget or no suitable candidate.
This is bad enough in a vacuum, but it compounds within months when we move to other milestones…
Milestone 2: Demoralization and demotivation
Current employees are largely not going to enjoy this news.
Existing employees fall broadly into a few different categories, but one of those categories is critically important to your business. That same category has also become a flight-risk overnight.
These employees are your top performers, these employees are significant for the company for a few reasons:
- They often have long term domain knowledge of the company’s business.
- They have contributed heavily to the “culture” that the company is seeking to replace with the in-office initiatives.
- They care more about the company than the average employee, sacrificing more time and effort to company-wide initiatives even outside their area of influence.
- This is the big one: They are working at the company by choice.
No single voluntary initiative has the capability to universally demoralize the workforce in such a rapid timeframe.
Demoralization is incredibly difficult to deal with at scale. It always exists in small pockets and can be contained appropriately by skilled staff, countered directly with a workforce that mostly enjoys the work and the workplace culture.
A demoralized team is never capable of operating at peak efficiency and effectiveness.
That meeting you were in when the news dropped? It was derailed.
The work you were planning to do later this afternoon? Derailed while you review the company’s announcement and accompanying FAQ document.
The work you had planned for tomorrow? You’ll be complaining with your co-workers instead of working.
This will continue for weeks, months, even years. Even the cream of the crop of your top performers in the company will be affected.
If the company is lucky, the work stays at the same quality but just slows down. More likely, the quality and quantity of the work will be diminished. All of this is happening even before the employees end up back in the office at all.
Deadlines will slip. Team members might disassociate or be distracted during work sessions. The top performing teams and workers will do as they always have, find ways to circumvent the questionable leadership and deliver work on their terms, regardless the rules and expectations.
This occurs on minute one of day one, and it only gets worse from here.
Milestone 3: A revision to the policy
Somewhere between the demotivation and the next step, the company might realize they made a mistake, or that the backlash is too severe. Leadership will not want the employees to use the company values against their message, and will retract certain statements while offering clarification on others.
This is a common negotiating tactic, and it will work on a significant portion of the workforce; Give them the worst version of the news first, dial it back (“Oh, this isn’t as bad as it could have been”), and make in roads on a compromise.
This might fool a portion of the workforce, but it will not fool the most important portion. The top performers and the otherwise prepared have already refreshed their resumé’s and started looking at other opportunities.
Milestone 4: Top Performers and others choose to leave
A few months into the process, people will start to leave the company. This cannot be helped, and it won’t surprise your leadership.
Some of these people have been with the company for years, and considered working here for many more before the news. Others are recent hires within the last 3 years that joined your company, originally enticed by the offer of remote work.
There will be no attempt to retain these people, nor would they stay at this point. The trust has already been eroded.
This causes massive issues, with no suitable candidates in the pipeline (remember the candidate pool issue?) and a diminishing workforce due to this attrition, initiatives risk missing timelines.
This forces the remaining employees on the team to take on more work.
The next milestone should not be a surprise.
Milestone 5: Demoralization Intensifies
People will have longtime coworkers they trust and like working with leave the company.
The remainder will begin to work just because they have to, and not because they want to. They no longer believe in the leadership to do right by them, and are now truly embodying a “punching the clock” situation.
When timelines slip, the company starts missing key objectives. When the company starts missing key objectives, annual performance reviews and bonuses begin to suffer.
For the last vestiges of a culture that the leadership wanted to change, this is the final straw.
Even those who remain will always remember “the beginning of the end.” It may be different times for different people, but all of them will look back on a certain time in the company’s history with admiration while looking forward to either a less ideal future or a prospective role somewhere else.
Milestone 6: Conflicted New Hires and Flight Risks
Your pool of potential new hires has been decimated at best, and annihilated at worst. This means that the caliber of employee that fills the role is very likely below par for what you previously had.
Sounds bad, but it gets even worse.
New hires that join during this stage will not be met with cheerful employees, but the jaded personalities that remain.
Jaded employees who straggle along will be a constant flight risk, as their previous connections find new opportunities for them to migrate to.
This period of time will last from 1-3 years at least, until the only employees that remain are a completely replenished force, or employees who otherwise just didn’t care/were exempt from the mandate. Those employees are often not in your top performers or even the above average performers, they are survivors. Survivors do not take risks and do not like extra responsibility, more on this later.
For leadership that wanted to revitalize the culture, for some reason, this should be considered a catastrophic failure. But we know better, don’t we?
Milestone 7: The End
The tragic comedy in all this? The leadership who initiated this change, by now, has also rotated out of the company and moved onto greener pastures.
You don’t work for an A-list company, remember? But that’s where your leadership has ambitions to end up. Or, at the very least, level up their role in another mid-tier company.
Their reward for initiating this cataclysmic change to the way the company does business was, primarily, using every person in the company as a pawn for an initiative that pads their resume on their way up the executive ladder somewhere else.
It’s too bad, truly, that these people are not going to be participating in the new future they designed. They will time their exit well in advance of any turmoil, and their successors will use this churn to build their own initiatives to “fix” what the previous broke. This vicious cycle exists separate of any rank and file employee, who are helpless to change it while being completely impacted by it.
The culture here will never be the same.
The golden era you look back on will be just that, a time that you truly enjoyed the work you were doing with the people in the moment.
Epilogue: This sounds bad. I’m confused, or have questions.
As do I, dear reader, as do I. If you’re an executive reading this and want to fill us all in, please do!
What do you mean by…
Top Performer?
Top performers are usually just people who are good at their job, in mostly all the facets that apply to it. This might seem difficult to measure, but it isn’t. One set of metrics ultimately determines a top performer, and those metrics are provided by the company itself.
An individual is at the top when any of the following apply to them during an annual timeframe:
- They get an excellent annual review (whatever counts as above average or better within your system)
- They get a spot bonus or retention bonus
- They get promoted
- They were hired (they were the best candidate in a sea of applications)
The calculation is simple in the eyes of a company, one or more of these means you are at the top. Scoring none means you are not. The perception of your work ethic only really matters if it can be documented in writing, preferably in your company’s HR system. Also, no top performer lasts forever. Eventually, you will fall from the top. It’s okay, this is part of the journey.
You might not like this news, you might disagree. I assure you, these are the only metrics that matter. Perception counts for a lot in the moment. It counts for little in retrospect when an HR professional or double skip level is reviewing the org chart.
Survivors?
Survivors do the bare minimum to keep their job while staying out of a performance plan or similar. They do not strive for extra bonuses, they don’t seek extra opportunities, and in fact constantly deny themselves any upward mobility. They enjoy their work life balance, and in a way, have reached a sort of zen enlightenment. These people “stay in their lane,” to use a modern parlance.
They are neutral to almost any leadership initiative or change, because they are survivors; They have existed before these new rules by today’s leaders and they will exist long after they have moved on.
A company has more survivors the longer is has existed. In large numbers they might drag on productive culture, but are ultimately a neutral force that won’t actively support or detract almost any situation or decision. They find ways to survive it while maintaining their zen.
How can corporate leadership get away with this stuff?
It’s easy, really. Leadership sets the goals every year.
If they plan for reduced workforce, they can plan for reduced output. They can modify the goal posts in whichever direction they like, and use turmoil as a justification. So long as the company technically makes money, everything is okay.
You might ask why they didn’t do this before, or you might ask why they can’t do it now to preserve the culture you currently have. Unfortunately, I can only surmise that they do this according to various initiatives that present the company or executives well on the street.
Natural attrition or layoffs actually give the balance sheet a boost. This might even translate to decent bonuses for the survivors, which leaders will lean on to temporarily boost morale. It’s a lot easier to choke down the loss of trusted colleagues and previous culture when you’ve been provided with a sizable bonus check.
Here’s some other information…
If the company loses all the top performers, won’t the leadership look bad?
Bad news, the way the review processes work, there will always be an excellent top performer. It’s built into the corporate requirement, and managers will want to grant this prestigious annual title to their best people in order to keep the ship afloat.
So, nothing to worry about here. The company will still have top performers as long as the fight to retain people is alive and the title itself has built-in rarity.
How do you know all this, anyway?
I’ve been a “top performer” by these metrics for all but 2 of my years in this industry. When I fell out of top performer status, I left for a new job and got it. I’ve gotten jobs in the good economy, and I’ve gotten them in the bad economy. I’ve worked hard, worked on some really cool projects, and been promoted far beyond my expectations. I’m incredibly thankful, and my thoughts on this matter don’t change the fact I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to work with so many great people over the years.
I’ve worked at a company that pulled two different RTO mandates, and now I work at a company and am part of a third. I’ve been a fully remote worker during an RTO mandate, and I’ve been a hybrid worker. In all cases, I’ve been part of the “leadership team” due to my rank in the company, but I have never been a manager and always been an individual contributor.
Unfortunately, the playbook and results have always been the same despite these differences in each experience.
All that being said, why trust an anonymous source on the internet? Well, I’m not asking you to. I sincerely hope your experience with RTO has been or will be different than mine.
I also know the struggle of sticking around in a bad situation too long hoping that people will change and things will improve.
Overall, when these types of situations occur and you have a bad feeling, things do not improve. Trust your instincts, you’ll be happier.