The Return to Office Mandate Myth

RTO

There’s been quite a bit of conflict between corporate employees and employers over return to office mandates.

However, these companies have no problem outsourcing your jobs — outside of the US to other continents!

All of the recent RTO Mandates you’ve been hearing about lately have nothing to do with improving innovation, communication and productivity. It’s a workforce reduction tactic meant to trigger voluntary resignations.

Amazon AWS CEO: Quit if you don’t want to return to office

The covert layoffs strategy is an effective way to avoid formal layoffs and severance packages. These companies then replace these positions from India, getting 4 employees for every American that quit.

Attrition

Attrition is often-used by businesses as a passive cost-saving strategy to reduce the number of employees in one location and rehire new employees cheaper overseas.

I was recently involved in a cost-cutting initiative that involved offshoring hundreds of US positions to India. While working with the new hires I learned that they were working a hybrid schedule (2 weeks from office / 2 weeks from home) — while the US office was ordered back to the office 5 days a week.

During the next weekly meeting the offshore team received a very warm welcome from the US team they were displacing.

Many of these corporate layoff announcements you hear about in the US become new hires in India:

https://layoffs.fyi/

To be less impacting and noticeable, they enploy an attrition strategy over several business quarters. The staff they retain – gets to onboard / train the offshore hires. These corporate cowards don’t even have the balls to fire you themselves. Instead, middle management is left traumatized terminating you and picking up the pieces.

To accommodate this, corporations and consulting firms have built large offices in these countries, often occupying multiple city blocks with employees working out of shared workspace environment – presenting potential security and data privacy concerns.

Here’s a curated list of Every Company’s Back-to-Office Strategy.

Let’s take a stand against these corporate overlords! Please share your opinions and stories in the comments below.