Back to your cubicles, you impudent pups. The boss wants you in traffic and swilling stale office coffee again. It’s good for business. Except that isn’t true, which poses a puzzle over the “return-to-office” preoccupations of some corporate chieftains.
In January President Donald Trump joined the Fortune 500 fad for demanding workers resume commuting. Trump ordered federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person,” on his first day back in office.
The goal of the executive order is to spur resignations from a federal workforce his administration vilifies and seeks to downsize. U.S. DOGE Service boss Elon Musk had earlier telegraphed the reasons in the Wall Street Journal, predicting in-person federal work five days a week, “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
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But for some business leaders with their eyes supposedly on the bottom line, the calls for returns to the office everywhere from Amazon to IBM to JP Morgan Chase, are a bit mystifying: Return-to-office mandates at Microsoft, SpaceX and Apple led to their most talented employees, “leaving to [go to] larger firms that are direct competitors,” found a 2024 case study, hurting “firm output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness.” A University of Pittsburgh study of Standard and Poors’ 500 firms last year found these mandates reduced employee’s job satisfaction without increasing the firm’s value or performance. A Cornell study of Russell 3000 firms found the policies don’t even juice stock prices, which might be expected to motivate senior executives more concerned about their stock options than running a company well.
So back-to-the-office demands drive away talented people, hurt performance and do nothing for a company’s value. Why do them? Some jobs do have to be in person, say a plumber or a surgeon (mostly). But the largest driving force behind the return-to-work mandates, suggest the early scholarship, is CEOs feeling lonely without minions.
An alternate explanation is that private industry’s mandates have the same purpose as Trump’s federal one: driving off workers through resignations. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, for example, cited a desire to cut managers by 15 percent in his September mandate to return full-time to the office. He has, however, denied the move was a “backdoor layoff” in November.
Okay then. Another theory is incompetence. That’s what the University of Pittsburgh study suggested, finding return-to-office mandates happen when managers “blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” In other words, people are being ordered back to their seats to cover the bosses’ behind, even at the cost of rankling employees.
No wonder they are rankled. A return-to-work mandate is a pay cut and a time suck. The U.S. average commuter with a car pays $2,043 a year for gas, insurance and maintenance. The average commute takes nearly 28 minutes back and forth every day. For the 32 percent of U.S. workers at work five days a week, that’s about 10 days of time donated to your boss every year. No wonder remote workers report more job satisfaction.
The sneaking feeling in the back of your head, though, that employees are supposed to donate this time and money to the boss, hints at the real reason for return-to-work mandates. A lot of the things that employees are supposed to do, commuting, weekly meetings, punching in and punching out, were exposed as unnecessary during COVID. Some would like to pretend that never happened. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” wrote Musk and hedge funder Vivek Ramaswamy in November, about a federal return-to-work order. The “privilege” here being not dying of a preventable infectious disease.
In that COVID era, in June of 2020, I interviewed the anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a few months ahead of his untimely death. His book had suggested that many modern jobs were make-work, created out of “managerial feudalism,” where bosses needed minions around to feel important and signal their importance to other bosses. Graeber felt vindicated by the revolution in working life triggered by COVID, which had exposed some jobs as “essential”—while others were not. Those nonessential workers, he concluded, never needed to clog highways, or sit through meetings where, one by one, people would update the boss while everyone else stared off into space, contemplating what they’d rather be doing with their brief time drawing breath, aka office life.
Managerial feudalism might well describe the finding that “office rents in the firm’s headquarters city determine RTO policy,” made in a 2024 study led by Sean Flynn of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. If office space is cheap, it found remote working more likely to end at a firm. In other words, the decision was all about filling desks, rather than increasing productivity.
Amazon’s Jassy burbled about “being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture,” in decreeing a five-day in-person office at that company in September. Such noises aren’t unusual from managers, the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark (Shuai) Ma told Fortune in January 2024, but his research found a desire to better control workers a better explanation for mandates. In surveys, some managers have even admitted their mandate motivation is wanting to watch workers work in person.
Despite the mandates from big-name firms—and Trump’s executive order—working from home at least part of the time has become the new norm in American life, with 25 percent of workers in fully flexible and 43 percent in hybrid workplaces. Workers somehow have figured out what works best for themselves. Many CEOs may have also figured this out, with only 4 percent in a 2024 survey saying they prioritize getting employees back to their desks five days a week.
That’s something for Trump to keep in mind when federal workers pile back into the office instead of quitting. The executive order does make room for “exemptions they deem necessary,” from agency chiefs, after all, presumably the ones who want work done.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
