I was being hyerbolic. I should have made that clearer. That said, there is a nugget of literal truth to my statement.
Market reactions are typically neutral to RTO announcements, which confounds some analysts who imagine that RTO adds some kind of value. However, studies have repeatedly shown that while the short-term impact of RTO is neutral these companies typically fair worse than peer companies over longer timeframes. To make it worse for the analysts, similar studies have also shown that companies which do embrace remote first work have outsized returns. Some estimates show that fully WFH organizations bring in about 7.5% higher annual returns on average than peer organizations that RTO.
Leaders continue to ignore the ever growing piles of evidence in favor of those analysts "common sense", and forget that "common sense" is just a laymans term for what scientists refer to as "making shit up."
Those same executives are most tempted to fall into this trap during times of duress, because being perceived as "doing something" is more important than long term impact on share price.
I can mostly agree with that, with an exception for giant corporations like the mentioned Apple and Amazon. Their runway for making wrong decisions (like RTO) is exceedingly long, due to their money and their moat.
You have a solid point. I also ignore the fact that RTO actually does improve the bottom line in some narrow scenarios, such as when it's used as a backdoor layoff in companies that don't mind losing the best and brightest.
Some companies don't see an appreciable difference in performance between those that can easily find work elsewhere and those who are otherwise unemployable. For those companies RTO is a great, though immoral, way to lower headcount without triggering the WARN act.
Market reactions are typically neutral to RTO announcements, which confounds some analysts who imagine that RTO adds some kind of value. However, studies have repeatedly shown that while the short-term impact of RTO is neutral these companies typically fair worse than peer companies over longer timeframes. To make it worse for the analysts, similar studies have also shown that companies which do embrace remote first work have outsized returns. Some estimates show that fully WFH organizations bring in about 7.5% higher annual returns on average than peer organizations that RTO.
Leaders continue to ignore the ever growing piles of evidence in favor of those analysts "common sense", and forget that "common sense" is just a laymans term for what scientists refer to as "making shit up."
Those same executives are most tempted to fall into this trap during times of duress, because being perceived as "doing something" is more important than long term impact on share price.