Getting workers back to the office is proving difficult for these large companies

When you’re working remotely, do you ever gaze wistfully at a pile of emails and remember the office with fondness? The free air conditioning, the bottomless adequate coffee, and the faint chatter of your colleagues discussing The Bachelor down the hall might seem like a relic to those workers who remain fully remote, but for most others, the office is still very much a thing, and employers are still blasting out company-wide missives declaring “RTO is imminent.”

Yet when it comes to effective RTO implementation, many major companies are still running into trouble, and it’s not the kind you’ll hear about in a hypnotic Taylor Swift chorus.

Here’s a brief snapshot of how RTO plans are currently playing out at prominent companies across the country.

RTO, but with no desks: Tesla workers were summoned back to the office for mandatory in-person attendance by CEO Elon Musk in May, but some returned to the company’s Fremont, California, facility in June to find an insufficient number of desks, according to a report from The Information.

There was also a shortage of parking spaces, which forced some to park off-site, commuting workers told the outlet.

Boeing blues. Aerospace giant Boeing enacted an RTO policy for some of its workers in the Puget Sound, Washington, area, effective starting this month, the Seattle Times reported. But the company is facing pushback from some workers who say they’ve enjoyed the flexibility of remote work.

One employee told the paper that they “would be looking for other jobs elsewhere” if the policy were to apply to them, adding that the messaging from the company has been unclear. Last month, CEO Dave Calhoun spoke highly of remote work at an all-hands meeting last month, telling employees that the pandemic “taught us all, especially us old-timers, that people can work virtually, they can be remarkably productive…in some ways more productive than coming to the office.”

Beg for it. Starbucks interim CEO Howard Shultz said he might resort to groveling to get employees back to the company’s corporate offices, explaining at the New York Times’s DealBook Policy Forum last month that workers “are not coming back at the level I want them to.”

He added: “I’ve pleaded with them. I said I’ll get on my knees. I’ll do push-ups. Whatever you want. Come back.”

Maybe tap dancing would do the trick?

IBM’s RT(N)O. Only 20% of IBM’s workforce is back in the office three days a week or more, CEO Arvind Krishna recently told CNBC at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Krishna said he doesn’t foresee IBM’s office occupancy “ever” rising above 60%, but at the end of the day, he seems OK with it. “I think we’ve learned a new normal,” he said.

Contrast all of this with Yelp. In a June statement, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said “the future of work at Yelp is remote,” and announced the closing of offices in NYC, Washington, DC, and Chicago that had a “weekly average utilization of less than 2% of the available workspaces.”

Zoom out. Global sentiment could give some major employers pause. According to ADP’s People at Work 2022: A Global Workforce View report, which surveyed 33,000 people worldwide, 64% of remote workers “would consider looking for a new job” if full-time office attendance were mandated by their employer.

Two-and-a-half years into a pandemic that turned work-life upside down, workers aren’t necessarily invoking the wrath of Milton, but it seems many wouldn’t object if someone figuratively burned down the old office space.—SB

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