The Bigger Issue Behind the RTO Mandates

Many large organizations have been going all-in on the return to office (RTO) mandates lately. When this first started happening, I raised an eyebrow, because I, for one, thought that hybrid work was here to stay.

So what’s happening here?

• Large organizations are pushing hard to get people back in the office, some now asking for 5 days a week. They are also rolling out heavy surveillance programs (mostly monitoring badge swipes) to pressure employees to comply with the mandates.

• The reasoning behind these mandates is all over the map. Some cite the value of in-person work (building more “weak ties,” which supports innovation, improved creativity, better mentoring and apprenticeship, etc.), while others cite the need for better utilization of office space (interestingly, they don’t worry that it’s unused on Saturday and Sunday, so why the problem on Monday?). Some have even openly implied they did it to push people to quit (so they wouldn’t have to lay them off).

• Employees are pushing back. Airbus employees launched strikes, Texas A&M faculty simply quit. And some leaders are pushing back on the push back. When JP Morgan employees created a petition calling for reversal of the mandate in 2025, the CEO said in a town hall “Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that *** petition.”

• Emerging research is not backing up the mandates. A Stanford-led randomized trial of 1,600 workers at Trip.com found hybrid employees matched full-office peers on output and promotion rate, while resignations dropped 33 percent. Researchers at Pitt studied S&P 500 companies that mandated RTO and found no bump in financial performance or firm value, only a drop in job satisfaction and a pattern consistent, in their words, with managers using the mandate “for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance.” One study at three tech firms concluded that RTO mandates were driving senior staff to competitors.

There’s a lot going on here, but I want to pull out one really important thread: the big companies that are pushing these mandates are moving backwards.

Ostensibly we all want the same thing here: a maximized balance between the value of flexibility and the value of collocated work. There are two very different approaches to getting there.

One treats our current context as a complicated system that needs to be expertly managed, and that’s what the RTO mandate companies are doing. They issue rules, or what complexity theorists call “governing constraints,” that will force the specific, right behaviors, according to their expert analysis. That’s why they don’t care about your petition; they have (in theory) already figured this out.

But their rules seem to stop at “be in the office.” If they really wanted to maximize the colocation time, they would have other rules (constraints) to ensure that managers are mentoring their employees, or that weak ties are being intentionally developed. I don’t see evidence of any of that, and the reason is simple: I don’t think it would work. Innovation and mentoring in organizations is a complex challenge, not a complicated one. A single rule isn’t going to cut it. You need to try out some approaches, learn from them, and continue to experiment until you find something that works for you.

Treating organizations as the complex systems they are is the other approach to achieving the maximized balance between flexibility and colocation. You need to experiment and learn by imposing “enabling” constraints (rather than governing ones). Create containers. Give time to teams to create apprenticeship practices that combine remote and collocated activities. Redesign part of your office space to be more open so weak ties can be formed. Those are very different kinds of mandates, based on an iterative process of learning by doing (rather than analyzing and dictating).

So when I say large organizations are going backwards, I don’t just mean back to the pre-pandemic system. I mean they are going backwards to a management world where most things were complicated, and experts from the top could dictate success. This is a signal that I am watching carefully. I wonder if we will start to see this “returning to our old ways” trend in other leadership and management contexts. If you’re seeing examples, let me know (jamie@jamienotter.com).

And if you’re trying to figure out your own approach to colocation, I encourage you to keep a complexity lens on it. Run experiments and look for useful patterns, rather than over analyzing or acting based on concepts alone. The consequences here are real. You do run the risk of losing good people if you don’t handle this well. I’m happy to serve as a coach to you in that process.