Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Despite high-profile calls for employees to get their butts back behind their desks in a traditional workplace setting, more people – at least in the UK – are ignoring return-to-office mandates, a study has found.

Researchers at King’s College London (KCL) and King’s Business School analyzed more than one million observations from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and some 50,000 responses from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) UK.

This gave a clear pattern of the trends between early 2022 and the end of 2024, highlighting “growing worker resistance to rigid office mandates”. Just 42 percent said they’d listen to their bosses and go back onsite for five days a week. This is down from the 54 percent that said they’d comply with requests in early 2022.

The percentage of staff insisting they’d rather look for a new job than return to their current employer’s office full-time rose to 50 percent at the end of last year, up from 40 percent in early 2022.

Women were more likely to resist RTO mandates, with 55 percent saying they’d look for a new job and 9 percent ready to quit outright by late 2024. Among men, 43 percent said they’d job hunt, and 8 percent would quit. Among mothers with young children, only 33 percent said they’d comply.

The percentage rates weren’t specified, but the study found black and minority ethnic respondents expressing higher rates of compliance with going back to the classic five-day week on site, “possibly reflecting job insecurity and workplace discrimination,” KCL said.

Plenty of tech businesses have initiated mandatory policies, including Amazon, Google, Dell, IBM, and Meta. Yet the UK stats show hybrid work has become the norm locally. A little more than a quarter of men and women in the LFS specified home as their main workplace setting in 2022, and this has largely stayed the same ever since.

Yet not all employers are created equally, KCL said:

“There is also evidence to show that employers are less likely to allow fully remote working, with a slight increase in the number of home working policies that permit staff to work from home only one to two days per week.”

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SWAA data shows that one in four work remotely at least three days a week and two in five at least once a week.

Taking a look at the wider picture, KCL warns that employers are creating a two-tier system. Tech firms were previously warned they risk losing their best talent if they order employees to work from the office, and there is seemingly no benefit to productivity or the bottom line for corporations that do so.

As we’ve written about before, bosses can be plagued by productivity paranoia – if they can’t see their personnel, they can’t be sure what they’re doing. Though as we revealed recently, another piece of research found more employees launching start-ups when they worked at home during the pandemic, so maybe some of that paranoia is justified.

An increasing amount of research shows that well-designed hybrid working models offer significant benefits for both employers and employees

Heejung Chung, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at KCL and the lead author of the report, said in a statement:

“An increasing amount of research shows that well-designed hybrid working models offer significant benefits for both employers and employees. Alongside this, there has been a marked shift in attitudes, with workers now seeing flexibility as the norm. Managers need to understand and adapt to this new reality. Rather than forcing a return to pre-pandemic working patterns, organizations should be looking to formalize hybrid models, invest in remote collaboration tools, and set up coordinated in-office days to maximize engagement.

“Where possible, workers should feel emboldened to hold their ground in the face of return-to-office mandates, as the weight of the evidence demonstrating remote working does not harm productivity is growing. In fact, many studies are finding flexible workers tend to work longer and harder compared to those who do not work flexibly – and importantly, those who are able to work remotely tend to be more loyal and committed to their jobs.” ®