What HR should consider if planning to RTO this year

Anyone else tired of the return-to-office conversation?

“I thought that by now, RTO and the conversation around it would have died out,” said Michelle Seidel, founder and principal consultant at Milestone Results Strategies and former Willis Towers Watson consultant. “And yet when I get HR leaders and business leaders together, it is almost always the top topic of discussion.”

Last year, HR Brew asked readers about their RTO plans for 2024. Nearly one-half (46%) said they planned to return to the office, with 8% intending to do so full-time and 37% on a hybrid schedule. Some 34% said they’d already returned to the office, and 21% said they’re sticking with remote work.

And it’s not just HR Brew readers: 39% of respondents to an August Resume Builder survey of HR managers and business leaders said they plan to RTO in 2024. Around one-half (51%) said they’d already returned to the office, and just 2% said they plan to continue to WFH indefinitely.

It’s been over three years since employers started to RTO, but that doesn’t mean all the kinks have been worked out. We spoke to Seidel and Felicia Lyon, partner at KPMG, about what HR leaders planning a 2024 RTO should consider.

What’s going on? It doesn’t take much more than a glance at the headlines to see that not all RTO plans are a resounding success. In the past few weeks, Deutsche Bank and SAP have faced criticism from employees over their RTO requirements.

Seidel said she has worked with some HR leaders whose strategies have fallen flat. One HR leader, she said, issued a four-day, in-person mandate that ultimately led to a decline in employee engagement and noncompliance with the policy. The company eventually scaled back to a three-day mandate, which helped resolve both issues.

Another company, she said, put its employees on two different in-office schedules: Monday, Thursday, and Friday, and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But what was meant to offer flexibility created inequities between employees, who saw certain days, like Friday, as a preferable day to WFH. So, Seidel said they moved everyone to the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday schedule.

Future is hybrid. Despite all the RTO requirements, employees still work from home 28% of the time, according to a Stanford report. That’s four times more than they did in 2019. As long as employees can reasonably do their jobs from home, Seidel said she expects hybrid is “going to remain strong, it is going to remain the norm, and it is going to remain well above what the pre-pandemic levels were.”

Lyon agreed that the future of work will be hybrid—if employers listen to their workforce.

“Folks are saying they value time in the office. They value time in-person with their colleagues,” Lyon said. “They just don’t want it like it was before, and they don’t want to go back to five days a week, long commutes, [and] missing kids’ soccer practice.”