Bosses are using RTO mandates as a way to blame employees as a scapegoat

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Office occupancy rates in major metro areas, per building security firm Kastle Systems’ weekly tracker, have held mostly steady at just shy of 50% since vaccines were made widely available.

As evidenced by the threat of a recession, the spate of layoffs, and the generally wary economic outlook over the past year, in-person work for most white collar jobs doesn’t always make workers more productive—which, after all, is what one would think should be the north star of any major business decision.

A new working paper by Mark (Shuai) Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Yuye Ding, a PhD student at its Katz Graduate School of Business, found that an office return isn’t actually boosting a company’s bottom line.

Not only did the researchers find that RTO mandates fail to significantly change financial performance or stock value, it does little more than rankle employees and tank their satisfaction.

As PR executive Ed Zitron wrote in Business Insider in November—and Ma quoted in the report—RTO mandates are little more than an attempt to convince investors that decreased revenue and profitability “aren’t a result of poor managerial decisions but the result of lazy workers sitting at home in their pajamas.” Zitron calls it “a genius move” on executives’ part, because it lets them “establish control over workers during an unprecedented societal awareness of labor rights…while also shifting the blame and consequences of poor stock performance onto those least responsible.”

Over the long term, Ma tells Fortune, mandates of any kind stand to undercut each of the goals managers say they’re meant to accomplish in the first place.

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