Believe it or not, corporate America has been talking about return-to-office mandates for nearly five years. Covid-era workplace flexibility started waning in the summer of 2020, as did some employees’ rejection of RTO plans. Some companies compromised with hybrid schedules. Others, like Amazon and Dell, followed suit before eventually requiring their employees to come back to the office five days a week. With 2025 just a few weeks away, HR Brew chatted with workplace experts about how executives and employees are feeling about RTO mandates—and how HR pros can referee their tug-of-war.

Employees are not happy. Flex work has positively affected employees’ work-life balance, burnout, and productivity. And now that they’ve gotten used to flexible schedules, 43% of US workers would rather lose their romantic partner or get a divorce than RTO full-time, according to a recent LiveCareer report.

Executives are reminiscing. When Amazon announced its five-day RTO, in the name of “strengthening our culture and teams,” some experts called CEO Andy Jassy’s decision an example of a phenomenon called “executive nostalgia,” Bloomberg reported. Think of it as leaders yearning for the workplace of their past, Leena Rinne, VP of coaching solutions at Skillsoft, told HR Brew.

HR can be an advocate. When senior leaders create an RTO plan without consulting their HR team, she said they’re missing an opportunity to get a “pulse” on how employees feel, and what they need.

Keep reading here.—MC

Employees aren’t engaged—and they haven’t been for awhile. Only 31% of US employees were engaged in Q3, according to a recent Gallup report. That’s up slightly from 30% in Q1, Gallup reported, when engagement was at its lowest level since 2013.

People leaders looking to increase engagement may want to focus on leaders. Some 41% of leaders disengaged at work, according to a recent survey from employee recognition software company Nectar. And 33% of employees said their managers directly impact their engagement.

“It’s so important to focus efforts on those middle management layers and different team managers to make sure that they’re highly engaged…” Cassidy Gonzalez, Nectar’s SVP of people and culture, told HR Brew. “A manager that’s disengaged…and not being helpful, these employees are left floundering. They don’t know how to thrive because there’s no direction showing them how to do it,” she later added.

There’s a relationship between leaders’ engagement and effectiveness, Gonzalez said.

Keep reading here.—MC

Bad news for job hunters—lots of employers are likely wasting applicants’ time by posting listings for “ghost jobs” that don’t exist.

That’s according to recent surveys by job sites Resume Builder and MyPerfectResume, which separately found evidence that fake listings are rife. Resume Builder’s May 2024 survey of over 1,600 hiring managers found 40% of firms posted a fake job this year, while a MyPerfectResume poll of over 750 US recruiters found 81% admit their employer posts ads for jobs that will never be, or have already been, filled.

Stacie Haller, chief career advisor at Resume Builder, and MyPerfectResume Career Expert Jasmine Escalera both told IT Brew they were surprised the practice was so widespread. Haller said the practice has long been common in the temporary staffing field, but, “what surprised [her] is how many corporate and HR organizations are starting to do this as well.”

“A lot of it has to do with appearance and to create an impression to affect either the outside world that they were growing and thriving,” she said. “Or internally—that they have people on the bench waiting in case they need to replace any employees.”

Keep reading on IT Brew.—TM