Workers skirting return to office orders
Companies amping up att4endance enforcement
By: Jessica Guynn
USA Today
..... Employers are calling workers back to the office. But are they complying?
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New research suggests some people are defying their bosses' marching orders even as the job market cools and job anxieties mount.
..... The average number of days employees are required to be in the office rose 12% over the past year, [2025] but office attendance showed an increase of just 1% to 3%, according to Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward and publisher of the Flex Index, which produced the report.
..... "The harsh return to the office mandate is like the law against jay walking. It exists, everybody knowns about it and nobody obeys it because it makes little sense," said Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom,. who studies remote work.
..... Showing up in the office five days a week was the norm until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down offices across America.
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With millions forced to work from home, commutes and cubicles faded into the rear-view as the flexibility of remote work caught on. Even as offices reopened, many workers continued logging in from home offices or worked a hybrid schedule two to three days a week.
.....Then came the rust of return-to-office mandates. "So many companies got a whiff of people actually feeling a slightly better work-life balance dong WFH (work from home) and decided joy was to part of the benefit package." one worker comment4ed on Reddit.
..... Employers see it differently. they say the pandemic-era isolation undercut collaboration and innovation that only comes form in-person interactions.
..... When JPMprgan Chase put the kibosh on flexible, hybrid schedules this year, [2025] CEO Jamie Dimon forcefully defended the move, saying returning to the office five days a week was essential to mentor new employees and foster company culture.
..... The new mandates were not popular with everyone. Morale took a hit at JPMorgan and elsewhere.
..... Sounding off in surveys and on social media, unhappy workers ticked off he downsides of the forced migration back to the office - and not just the fluorescent lighting, cramped cubicles, smelly food in the microwave or annoying coworkers.
..... Long commutes increase stress and reduce productivity. The daily cost of in-office attendance - an average of $61 a day when hybrid workers are in the office, according to video conferencing firm Owl Labs' 2024 State of Hybrid Work -take a bit out of family budgets.
..... Some contend that going into the office defeats the purpose with many teams spread out across cites and time zone. Then there's the impossible task of squeezing doctor's appointments and child care pickups into 9-to-5 office schedules.
..... Smarting from the new status quo, some remote workers forced back to the office say they no longer put in the extra effort and are reclaiming their time instead.
..... It's not just the rank-and-files according to Bloom. Middle managers aren't any more enamored with RTO mandates then their reports.
How remote workers defy RTO
..... That noncompliance comes in different forms.
* "Coffee badging': Some workers "coffee badge" - swipe into the office, grab a cup of Joe and head home, or tap a co-worker to swipe in for them - or they show up for short periods of time, schedule emails to be sent after they've left the office, chat up co-workers then peace out after lunch. According to Owl Labs, 44% of U.S. employees who were ordered back to the office confessed to "coffee badging."
* Ignoring RTO mandates: Another common strategy is to quietly ignore the RTO policy. At some firms where tracking and enforcement is lax, it's possible to fly under the radar if you don't make a fuss. "We had no badges or in-office bosses," one workers said on Reddit. "so while a large chunk of people mass quit, w just simply never went in. I had to keep telling my co-workers not to follow up. He kept wanting to ask about it and I'm like shut up, they don't bring it up, we don't bring it up."
* Negotiating special treatment: High-ranking and top-performing employees who could be poached by competitors increasingly use their leverage to cut deals. "Pref romance mattes more tan compliance," Elliott said. "Managers when face with mounting demands to "do more with less' are unwilling to remove someone who's a good performer."
* Comply then slack off: "Just do it for a few months then he'll forget about it" were the word of one senior executive to his team, according to Elliott. "I've looked at data from some of the commercial real estate management companies and you can also see an initial peak after a mandate and then a falloff - people complying for a while to make the boss or, more realistically, the boss's boss happy, then trailing off..
Why bosses are snooping on you
..... Office surveillance is on the rise as companies step up monitoring and enforcement of office attendance at the highest rate in five years, the survey found.
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Of the companies surveyed, 69% - up form 45% last yer [2024] - are keeping tabs on how often employees come into the office and how long they stay through badge-swipe, cell-phone tracking and other methods.
..... Media reports say Amazon, Facebook owner Meta and TikTok all have systems to track attendance. Samsung recently rolled out an RTO tracking tool to crank down on "coffee badging" among its U.S. semiconductor staff, business Insider reported.
.....What's more, nearly 37% of companies are taking enforcement actions, up from 17% in 2024, the CBRE report found
..... One chief human resources officer at a major company told Bloom they monitor whether employees are adhering to three days in the office over an eight-week period. Anyone showing up less than 1.5 days on average gets called in to see human resources.
..... "You can see that is a lot of slack," eh said. "You can come in two days a week and be fine."