A new paper from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh examined RTO.
They researched if return-to-office mandates actually increase productivity or performance.
Results found managers “use RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame them for bad firm performance.”
They also found that RTO mandates were more common for firms with poor prior stock market performance.
However, they found no significant impact of RTO mandates on stock returns or firm profitability.
The researchers looked into public RTO data from 137 S&P 500 firms for this analysis.
Additionally, using data from Glassdoor, the researchers found that RTO reduced workers’ ratings for job satisfaction.
Recently, RTO mandates have divided many leading tech and financial companies nationwide.
The research found that a well done RTO mandate should have managers focusing on mentoring.
That incentivizes leaders to figure out what’s the best way to develop their teams.
“Badly run RTO will be requiring minimum days per week but with no guidance on days”, they said.
However, there could be differences in performance between full-time and part-time RTO policies.