Return-to-office mandates are killing workplace trust

I changed job recently. When I was hired, my manager told me I could work from home indefinitely. But her manager came back from vacation and wants everyone to come back to the office at least 3 days a week, to “foster team spirit”.

However nobody likes to go to the current office because it’s an old warehouse that is dark, and most employees don’t have their own place, so we have to hunt for a free desk every time we go there. But we’re moving to a new office soon and she says that because we pay a hefty price for that space, she will expect everyone to go at least 4 days a week.

So far I’m the most efficient of my team. It’s boring and I’m clearly overqualified but I was okay with this as long as I could work from home. I have my own office, with a view on the city, my kitchen, my own private bathroom, and team spirit can be achieved without the need to be physically at the same place.

I see return to the office as a failure to use technology, and a way to control me and my coworkers. She feels lonely because she is the one that likes to go to the office, and she wants everyone to commute needlessly, like she does, so we can all be miserable together. Well, I’m not going to lose an hour of my life going to and from the office 4 days a week to make her happy. I will indeed quit as soon as it becomes mandatory.

The data is clear. Workers are happier, and more productive at home. Huge benefits to society and environment as well.

The only exception seems to come from those who live alone and where work is their only physical social contact.

My work lost decades of experienced workers forcing people back to office with long commutes.

the people with the most options are often the first to leave. The employees who remain may not be the most committed — they may simply be the least mobile.

This has been called the Dead Sea Effect.

What remains, in all cases, is usually very salty.

I asked my boss why the company insisted we show up three times a week. It was basically to justify the cost of putting the buildings there, maybe some kind of tax benefits. She called it “funny money”. I quit my job.

It sure killed the last tiny iota I had left. My company had some WFH before COVID, we all did 6 years full WFH until just recently, they also announced a big “WFH is the future!” Thing last year. Then this year changed their minds and issued an RTO mandate.

I could MAYBE understand working in the same building if my whole team all worked directly together on the same project and we were all in the office, but a giant chunk of the company is all over the country, 3/4 my team is remote, but me and a few unlucky chumps have to drive in to join the video calls from a conference room that never connects correctly and is 10x harder to hear and communicate in.

But this is “for collaboration” we were told. It’s been almost a year now and I have yet to have an 100% in person meeting or any meaningful collaboration or anything positive really. It’s cost me more money, cost me and the company a lot of wasted time sitting in a car, it made work 10x slower and harder to do, my mental health dropped drastically and a ton of our best coworkers all left and the extra work got dumped on us that stayed.

It’s hell. I also “quietly quit” because they don’t even care about actual work getting done, only if everyone looks busy and the spreadsheet numbers look all pretty. I used to work hard and enjoyed my job, not anymore, and RTO + strict helicopter management is the cause.

Its not just bad for the people that were working from home, but for the people that didn’t have the option as well. Being able to come to work and put on music, having clean restrooms and space in the break room, the low amount of commuting traffic. Now everyone is forced back and it sucks so much being crowded again and spending twice the amount of time getting to and from work.

We are lead by the emotions of idiots, and the greed of monsters.

We have leadership who do not understand how work gets done. They don’t do work like their employees do. They don’t code or do code reviews.

In 2019, debating with a COO that didn’t want any WFH at all, I said that requiring people to sit in front of you to work is saying that you don’t trust them and that you don’t know how to manage them or measure their output.

He didn’t accept it, but had no rebuttal. I wonder if he’s learned any of that by now.

Over-emphasizing metrics about employee submission and control is another clear sign of the decay of social order under capitalism. This is a society whose organizing functions have no direct concern for people’s wellbeing. These employers deserve every scrap of contempt they foster.

I’ve grown to absolutely despise my employer over this. I work for the federal government as a “manager” in a call center, and over the last couple of years we’ve gone from full‑time WFH to being forced back into the office 80% of the time.

I understand that a lot of employers are doing this to push people out, especially now with budget cuts and mass layoffs happening in the government. But that wasn’t the original reason. They did it because corporations and wealthy business owners complained about losing downtown business in major cities. (They wrote an open letter to the government lol)

The fact that my employer is willing to make employees’ lives worse just to appease the rich is revolting. Fuck them and fuck the rich.

What makes me even angrier is how easily everyone accepted it. We could have pushed back. We could have simply continued doing our jobs from home, they can’t fire everyone. Instead, people just complained but complied.

Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to go along with it. The idea of being used as a pawn to make the rich happy made me furious. So I just didn’t go. And I didn’t enforce the rule with my team either. For a while, this worked. My boss would talk to me, I’d explain that I was at least 60% less productive in the office, I’d promise to start going, show up for a month, then stop again.

Eventually they escalated things and dragged me into a fact‑finding meeting with HR. At that point, I had no choice, they were monitoring my attendance daily. I can’t afford to lose this job; the pay is good and there aren’t many alternatives in my area. But simply giving in wasn’t an option either.

So I started calling virtual doctors until I found one willing to properly fill out a duty‑to‑accommodate form. It cost me $150, but it worked. They approved me for full‑time work‑from‑home for medical reasons.

It sucks that it had to come to this, and it sucks even more that other employees weren’t willing to push back. But my mental health couldn’t handle going to the office just to be less productive and to satisfy the demands of people who already have more than enough.

After SIX years fully remote my agency is now death rolling us into rto. First it was “just once a month”, then “well only once a week”, and now “two days a week isn’t bad!” and it’s absolute bullshit. I’ve heard my direct manager and director both say we returned to the office to “make our new building look full” (that started construction AFTER we went full remote) and “to socialize.” Fuck them.

The worst part though? Our new building is ALL open office/open table spaces with no privacy bullshit. I cannot explain how fucking terrible that is to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. If you still have cubicles, consider them a luxury.

It’s not like there was a social contract before that. Management always resort to whatever they can get away with, and unless the workers organize to resist them, they can get away with a lot.

A company is not a person. The only trust you should ever have in a company is that it will always do what is best for the board.
Sometimes treating employees well is best for the company, but that can change in an instant.

People had workplace trust?

Just work for companies that don’t have offices, simple as.

Just middle to upper management and real estate investors conspiring to justify their phoney-baloney jobs at the expense of the worker.

There’s “workplace trust?”

And completely destroying moralle.The in office landscape has completely changed since pre-pandemic. I drive 40 minutes one way to a building where I either get immersed in a project in my cubical on my computer or I sit on Teams meetings. And meetings are virtual first now. Physical attendance optional. Half the time I’m on a call with someone a few cubes up from me.

Don’t get me wrong. The “virtual first” mindset is great. Most of the corporate world of finally figured out that we can schedule meetings and Outlook even has this really cool feature that allows you to send people invites to said meetings.

The problem is that there is no legitimate reason that I should have to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of my time per year to do the exact same shit I do from home but slower, less efficiently, and much less comfortably.

Isn’t this already widely known? Follow the pattern. First: strict and abrupt RTO with no exceptions. Second: layoffs.

I have watched this pattern happen in the news but also to friends and family mostly in the IT industry.

My company is a subsidiary of a larger corporation. Corporate started an RTO mandate early last year, requiring all employees to be in the office Tues-Thurs. Then a few months later, they announced that they were closing the corporate headquarters and moving to a bigger city 40 miles away for “reasons”. No accommodations for people who live close to the old offices. They are expected to commute to the new location or quit/get fired. It seemed pretty clear, to me, that this was a soft way of forcing people to quit.

We are in a completely different location and we have the confounding issue of having given up our office lease during Covid and leasing a smaller office space that cannot accommodate everyone. So for the moment we are being allowed to mostly stay remote. However, the company has leased additional space and is in the process of building it out with the looming threat of also requiring everyone to be in-office. Even people who do not live (and have never lived) locally. If this happens, we will lose a large number of key employees who are unwilling to uproot their families for the sake of a job. They will absolutely be able to get new jobs elsewhere, and it will hurt our team massively.

But here’s the thing: we all love our work, and our project. So in response, we organized and voted to form a union. It’s not clear, yet, if this will save us from RTO, but it definitely puts us in a much better position to bargain with corporate.