Envoy made RTO part of performance reviews. Could your company do the same?

For Envoy, a firm that provides companies with analytics and insights on their physical workspaces, in-office attendance is key to the business model. During the pandemic, Envoy developed a product that helped offices monitor Covid-19 tests, vaccinations, and safety guidelines as they brought workers back into the workplace.

After spending several years helping their customers navigate the return to office (RTO), Envoy decided to call its own approximately 250-person staff back into the office. VP of People Jacqueline Sharma admits “there were big, big feelings about” the policy, but told HR Brew she sees it as part and parcel of Envoy’s work. “We depend on people being in an office, so we really need our employees to believe in that mission,” Sharma said.

Envoy has tried several approaches to get workers to adhere to the RTO policy. Some have fallen under the “carrot” category, while one could be considered a “stick”: Tying office attendance to performance reviews.

Carrot vs. stick. Sharma joined Envoy in February 2023, around the same time it rolled out its RTO policy. Envoy has locations in New York, Denver, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, as well as the UK; most employees are required to work from one of these offices on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

To encourage in-office attendance, Sharma and her team started offering a “recharge” day to teams that meet the RTO requirement each month. Envoy measures adherence to the RTO policy using its own technology, Sharma said. Its software allows employees to see their attendance and document exceptions for HR, “because there are cases in which somebody is sick, or needs to be home to take care of a sick child or a family member. And we want to be respectful of that.”

Sharma said offering “recharge” days has been successful, and Envoy has kept that carrot in place.

More recently, Envoy started incorporating office attendance into performance reviews. “I know that many companies are sort of struggling with how to view [RTO], if it is part of performance. Here at Envoy, because it’s core to our business, it is part of our performance management,” Sharma said.

Envoy rates employees based on competencies on a scale of 1–5. Their final score is an average of these scores. For the most recent review cycle, Envoy added attendance as a competency, and scores could be docked from “5” to “2” for those not in adherence, she said.

Sharma followed up with HR Brew in March after Envoy completed its review cycle. She said, via email, that there was “only one case in which an individual did not meet the attendance requirement and therefore, their overall performance score was decreased as a result.”

Rating RTO. Envoy isn’t alone in its RTO approach; a number of companies have recently started incorporating attendance into performance evaluations. Google made headlines for doing so in June 2023, and more recently Dell told workers that if they’re remote, they won't be eligible for promotions. Some 74% of managers surveyed by software company Capterra in 2022 said they already factored, or planned to factor, attendance into performance reviews.

The obvious benefit of tying RTO to performance is that it will likely increase office attendance, said Brian Westfall, an associate principal analyst at Capterra, who covers HR and talent management. “If employees have been hesitant in the past, but they realize their performance review, which is also likely tied to their bonus, is going to be tied to if they come into the office, that is going to incentivize them to come into the office more.”

But there are possible drawbacks HR leaders should be aware of, as well. Top-performing employees might become frustrated if they receive a lower performance grade than a colleague who came into the office, Westfall said. Concerns about “proximity” or “visibility” bias—a phenomenon in which managers favor employees they see face-to-face—may also come to the fore if companies start factoring attendance into performance data, he added.

Hannah Wilken, regional director of people science at Culture Amp, said she doesn’t see any problem with treating RTO like any other workplace policy, so long as there are clear expectations in place. As with any security or safety policy, “if you are non-compliant, then of course, that should be part of the performance management,” she said.

Wilken cautioned, though, that RTO policies can be jeopardized if employees notice top executives aren’t in compliance, or aren’t seeing attendance factored into their performance. Such inconsistencies “can really, really harm the perceptions of fairness for an employee,” she said.

Sharma said that while she did consider there might be frustration with Envoy’s decision to make attendance a part of performance management, she received “little negative feedback.” She attributed acceptance of the policy to the fact the company has been transparent about its RTO expectations, and gave employees “ample heads up” that it would become part of the performance process.