Thoughts on RTO from F500 Executive

I’m a mid-level exec in corporate strategy at a Fortune 500 company with a major RTO push. While I’m in no way a decision maker for RTO (and personally would prefer WFH), I thought it might be a useful perspective for this forum to have.

First, the “preserve office valuation” thing is completely irrelevant. While it may have been a driver for one or two leaders like JPM, for normal companies (even large ones) our RTO policies won’t meaningfully change the citywide or national real estate market and it’s just a sunk cost.

The #1 driver was productivity. Our IT team pulled the data across the company and found double-digit percentages of employees not opening their laptop, not logging in, etc. on any given workday. That’s obviously unsustainable.

I think there’s a recognition that employees hate RTO. The boomer cohort at the very top is basically not going to budge on this. Once they retire and Gen X takes over, I suspect a lot more flexibility in an attempt to attract high quality talent.

For our company the relevant strategic considerations would be: -What monitoring (software or management) is required to avoid disastrous WFH outcomes like people drawing a paycheck without working? And how hard is this to implement? -To what degree will remote work allow us to attract higher-caliber talent for roles that matter and cheaper international workers for more routine roles?

Again, full disclosure, I’m not on the team doing anything with WFH/RTO and my personal preference would be for more WFH. But I’m happy to answer any questions on the actual business perspectives since most people here are coming at things from a worker’s perspective.