HR Expert Calls Out Executive Who Issued A Return To Office Mandate Because 'You Can Have A Job Working From Home But You Can't Have A Career'
Her presumptuous reasons for a return to office mandate make no sense and are totally divorced from the data.
g-stockstudio / Canva Pro Despite conclusive data that workers hate return-to-office mandates, companies keep implementing them.
As one woman shared while attending a recent business conference, the reasons business leaders give for their RTO mandates often make very little sense.
Brittany Pietsch called out an executive's return to office mandate in a speech at a recent HR conference.
Pietsch made international news at the beginning of 2024 when the video she made of her layoff from tech company Cloudflare went massively viral.
To many, it seemed to perfectly capture the cold indifference with which most corporations treat their employees today.
Her video resonated not just with workers but with many in the HR field, and she was recently invited to speak at Transform, a conference for corporate HR leaders.
One speech she saw, from Liz Dente, the Chief People Officer at travel company Priceline, left her slack-jawed.
Dente claimed that return-to-office mandates are necessary because working from home will hobble employees' careers.
Return-to-office mandates have been on a precipitous rise. One study by ResumeBuilder found that a whopping 90% of companies with office space that don't already have an RTO mandate plan to implement one by the end of 2024.
Despite the drive to get workers back into the office, RTO schemes remain wildly unpopular with workers. A recent study showed that 99% of companies that issued an RTO mandate saw a drop in employee satisfaction.
Dente's take on the in-office/work-from-home debate struck Pietsch as similarly out-of-touch. In a TikTok, she said Dente told the gathering, "I believe that people can do a job from home, but I don't believe they can have a career from home."
That is, obviously, absurd on its face. It's the kind of sweeping, presumptuous, one-size-fits-all declaration that is impossible to even verify and suggests Dente has appointed herself some kind of arbiter of people's careers.
It feels an awful lot like concern-trolling to convince the underlings she's on their side. If she were a man, we'd call it paternalism, the good old-fashioned, "don't worry, peon, I know best" attitude that is as galling as it is problematic.
That's just this writer's take on the matter, of course, but suffice to say Pietsch was no more impressed with Dente's take than I am.
"That, to me, tells me that you don't believe in my ability to take control of my own career and tell you what works best for me," she said, adding that if she heard a similar take in her own company "I'm immediately looking for another job."
"Where did you get that information from?" she went on to ask. "Are you pulling that from your own personal experience?" That's a fair question since there's not much basis for Dente's take.
Recent data shows that RTO mandates provide no benefit to businesses.
"[Dente] further explained the three reasons why they're doing [an RTO] and all three reasons that she said all have to do with company productivity," Pietsch explained. "And to me, that is a huge, huge red flag. It feels like we're going backward."
She's right to feel that way because the data simply does not back up contentions about return-to-office's positive impact on productivity and profits, despite a handful of recent studies claiming as such.
The highest-profile studies making such claims have been undermined by laughable bias, like one commissioned by an office design architecture firm. Others have been too narrowly focused to even be meaningful, like one that solely studied call-center workers in India — hardly an analog for… well, really any workforce besides call-center workers in India.
A wide-ranging January 2024 study out of the University of Pittsburgh's Katz School of Business, however, is the opposite. It analyzed 457 companies and more than 4,455 quarterly reports between 2019 and 2023, and conclusively found that RTO mandates made absolutely no financial difference to a company's revenue or stock prices compared to companies that simply let everyone continue working from home after pandemic restrictions were lifted.
It confirms what most of us suspect: Return-to-office mandates make very little sense (unless you factor in the connections to the commercial real estate market, that is), which is probably why Pietsch's pushback on Dente's comments during her own speech deeply resonated with the conference audience.
"I was like, 'you know, I heard [Dente's comments] yesterday and it really struck me because I have to say I completely disagree,'" Pietsch recounted. "I got a round of applause, which was refreshing and [a relief] to see that not everyone agreed with what she said."
Business leaders can try to drag the workforce back in time all they want, but the data isn't on their side — and there has yet to be any real evidence that workers are either.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.