Tag: hybrid workf

Return to office (RTO) mandates aren’t popular, as report after report shows. Whether they are announced in a my way or the highway style, like Amazon’s Andy Jassy or JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, or with less bluster. Some research shows RTOs are not effective tools for boosting productivity, and that plenty of workers are finding ways to skirt the policy.

Now a new report suggests that the gap between RTO mandates and employee compliance remains because many managers may be so burnt out that they’re completely uninterested in forcing their staff to follow controversial and deeply unpopular company rules. It could be that over-stressed managers are driving this so-called “hushed hybrid” office culture, Fortune suggests.

Support for this conclusion comes from a survey by Flex Index, which describes itself as a platform for analyzing flexible workplace habits. Among 14,000 companies it looked at, increasing numbers of RTO mandates drove required in-office time up by 12 percent since early 2024, meaning staff have gone from an average expected office attendance rate of 2.57 days a week to 2.87. That may sound modest, but remember this includes companies that remain fully remote. Regardless of what the RTO rules say, actual attendance has not risen at the same rate. Over the same period while in-office time expectations rose 12 percent, actual attendance only rose by 1 percentage point, to 3 percent.

Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward, which publishes the Flex Index, told Fortune that some workers can get away with ignoring leadership demands that they spend more time in the office in person with practical arguments supporting more flexible arrangements. For example, managing online meetings with multiple staff members across multiple time zones remains challenging in any setting — so staying at home on a day like that wouldn’t make a difference to productivity.

And, given high levels of management burnout and disengagement, employees may be more likely to get away with this sort of trick more often than you may expect. “If I’m the manager and I’ve got a solid performer and they’re coming in two or three days a week, but not five, I’m not going to fire them,” Elliott said. That’s because as long as someone is “delivering the goods and getting their work done,” managers who are under severe pressure themselves may simply decide that compliance with certain policies is lower on the list of priorities.

Anecdotally, Elliott’s thinking makes sense: reports show that executive burnout remains a serious issue in U.S. workplaces, with a survey in March reporting some 72 percent of workplace leaders report feeling burned out. Given the trend toward flatter business structures with fewer middle managers, led by big tech firms like Meta and Microsoft, it’s entirely plausible that stressed-out middle managers, overburdened with work and worried about the threat technology like AI represents to their own jobs, would simply ignore the exact amount of time that key workers spend in the office, even if it violates RTO rules that have been sent down from upper management.

Why should you care about this?

It’s another signal that RTO rules sometimes just don’t make good business sense. If you expect your managers to enforce an unpopular new rule, you might be adding to their already high stress levels while also genereating resentment from the employees that report to them. That’s a recipe for increasing the chance your strict RTO policy might simply be ignored by the people who are supposed to enforce it.

If your company is requiring people to spend more time in the office, then perhaps the way to make your policy work is with encouragement and perks: Flex Index’s data show that if you try stamping your foot, you might just end up being ignored, and, possibly, hurting your workforce’s perception of your leadership.

Also, there’s an underlying data point here: managers may be burning out under your leadership, and it’s possible you may not have noticed. It might be time for a pep talk, and honest chats about work burdens and stresses. 

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