The secret exec battle behind RTO mandates

New year, new terms in the corporate lexicon. There is "hushed hybrid," which is when folks secretly convene with managers to flout stringent telework policies. What about "coffee badging"? This refers to employees who technically head to HQ, but just long enough to swipe an ID card and enjoy a hot beverage before heading back home. But there is another one making the rounds, much to remote workers' chagrin: "return to office," or RTO.

Quite a few organizations (not just Amazon) have mandated that employees must return to a corporate office five days a week starting this month.

Many people value remote work. Obviously, that is the side that I land on — Aha! was an outlier with no office from day one, and we have been 100% distributed since we founded the company in 2013. This enabled us to hire the best talent, support our global customer base, and avoid the real estate waste that often comes with scaling a startup to a meaningful company.

Co-located teams might be necessary for very specific industries, but not most. Every meaningful company is distributed to some degree. And the percentage of people who always telework has mostly held steady over the last few years. In fact, remote hours as a percent of total hours worked actually increased in the U.S. since 2022.

So, why are the waves of RTO mandates still swelling up? Who (and what) is behind the anti-remote philosophy?

You might think the RTO mandates are a reaction to how companies went remote. Many organizations were forced to do so in an unnatural way during the pandemic. Those were uncertain times, and definitely not indicative of what it is typically like to work in a distributed model. During those same years, quite a few companies recklessly overhired — only to dramatically scale back when economic conditions shifted.

But executives and leaders rarely say so. In company memos and media interviews, the reasoning behind remote policy reversals is usually that in-person work is essential to creativity, productivity, and company culture. A few execs play the productivity blame game and pin underperformance on remote workers. Meanwhile, teammates are left fretting about RTOs as backdoor layoffs.

If your company has announced an RTO mandate or you sense one percolating, you are likely wondering how you got here.

Well, I can tell you that the executives strong-arming you back into commutes and conference rooms are not being entirely truthful. There is a secret battle happening behind the scenes. (And it is not the fact that many of the high-profile leaders in the news do not themselves work in the office regularly.)

Most of the companies mandating an RTO (even yours) are suffering from a mix of management challenges rooted in strategy, trust, and fear:

Lack of vision

These companies are lacking a clear and understandable vision. And leadership knows it — they are acutely, painfully aware of how rudderless the organization is at this moment. Goals are murky, plans keep changing, and there is no shared sense of purpose among the team. Forcing everyone back into the office gives them a sense of control in the chaos.

Limited transparency

Leaders have no insight into what folks are working on and why. Teammates do not know either. Processes are poorly defined. There is no self-serve workflow documentation to accelerate productivity, and folks are weighed down by tool proliferation. Every new effort feels like a one-off, and execs do not know how to engage and lead without the crutch of in-person hovering.

Broken trust

Executives struggle with understanding how to manage distributed teams because of their own mistrust. No one is truly accountable for or able to measure output; there is little connection between work in progress and higher-level goals. The result is a sense of sluggishness because there is no urgency. And even if there was urgency among the team, the current conditions leave the big bosses with no faith that people can work hard from afar.

Fear of the future

Leaders are reacting from a place of fear. There is a deep concern about what will happen (to them) if the organization fails to progress. Despite the fact that "visibility" and "face time" are just as possible in a remote setting, decreeing that there will be more collaboration and creativity in a co-located environment soothes worries about the future. It feels like doing something — even if rationally, we all know much more is needed.

These challenges will not disappear because people commute to a specific building. Achievement is not a place, and it is certainly not measured by in-person attendance.

Creativity, productivity, and company culture are incredibly important to any high-performing organization. But these traits are the result of thoughtful leadership grounded in real strategy — not a specific location. It takes effort and intention to set and lead with goals, invest in organizational excellence, and formalize workflows.

Besides, in-office team performance is often an inference based on personality or appearance instead of how well the organization operates or what folks actually contribute. RTO mandates feel out of touch because the policies are ultimatums that do not address the deeper issues undermining these companies. And it is shortsighted to boot, as mounting evidence shows that the highest performers will quit first.

Leaders might not like it, but the way we work has changed. You cannot move forward by going back to the way things were. The battle continues.

Aha! is a 100% distributed company. Learn more about how we work remotely.