(Bloomberg) -- New Year’s Day is the new line in the sand in the ongoing return-to-office battle.
AT&T Inc. and Sweetgreen Inc. have both told non-frontline staff to get back to their desks more often come January. The telecom giant will require more US corporate employees to be in the office five days a week. The salad chain is moving to four days for the few hundred support staffers who don’t work at its restaurants. While specifics often vary by location and business unit, the impacted workers at both companies currently come in about three days a week.
The fresh mandates follow a decree from Amazon.com Inc., whose CEO told corporate employees in September that a shift to five days in the office in 2025 would strengthen collaboration, connections and its overall culture.
“That was the big turning point where everyone’s like: ‘Oh, they’re doing it, now we can do it,’” Sweetgreen co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Neman said.
On Jan. 2, Sweetgreen will move to a “hard four” days from its current “more flexible” three or four day policy, Neman said in a recent interview, adding that he made his decision before Amazon’s announcement.
A majority of AT&T employees and leaders have been in the office five days a week, including during the pandemic, a spokesperson said via email. The company declined repeated requests to provide details on exactly how many employees are impacted by the new rules.
Workplace Divide
Both companies are well-known consumer brands that employ thousands of frontline staff who have to work on site. But allowing some employees to work remotely can cause a split in the workforce by creating a sense of haves and have-nots, experts in organizational behavior say.
AT&T’s shift is the second big move it’s made to its sprawling workforce in as many years. In 2023, CEO John Stankey said more than 60,000 managers would have to relocate during a period of office consolidation, which some experts and employees interpreted as a stealth layoff.
In its most recent proxy statement, AT&T said 18,000 managers opted to relocate. Gripes about the firm’s RTO have appeared on social media, with one poster in a Reddit group devoted to the company calling it “totally ridiculous, it’s 2024 not 1994.”
Over the past two years, employers have shifted from enticing workers back to offices with free food and other perks to forcing them because remote work has proved much stickier than many bosses expected.
Starbucks, Dell
Some big employers, such as Starbucks Corp., have told staff they could be fired if they don’t abide by its RTO policy, while Dell Technologies Inc. and Wall Street banks have said that remote workers aren’t likely to get promoted as they miss out on in-person mentoring and learning opportunities.
The share of companies that are in the office all week declined slightly to 32% in the fourth quarter, according to the Flex Index, which tracks attendance policies covering 100 million workers across more than 13,000 companies. A survey of employers from ZipRecruiter Inc., though, found that five-day policies have become slightly more popular over the past year.
Meanwhile, offices in the biggest US cities remain half empty compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to security firm Kastle Systems, roiling the commercial real estate sector and sending debt delinquencies spiking in November.
The logistics around requiring more time in the office can also be difficult. Amazon’s policy shift has been delayed over a lack of space in some locations.
The RTO tug-of-war has a human cost as well. More stringent policies can hurt a firm’s recruiting and retention, according to new research. University of Pittsburgh associate business professor Mark Ma and colleagues found that “firms experience abnormally high employee turnover following RTO mandates,” with the brain drain being worse among female and more experienced employees in the tech and finance fields. It also takes “significantly longer” for those companies to fill vacancies.
“RTO mandates are costly to firms and have serious negative effects on the workforce,” Ma said in the paper.
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