RTO Office Mandate

magoo84

My employer wants all of us to come back to the office, having been fully remote since March 2020. From what I've heard, at least part of the decision as to who comes back and for how many days a week will be decided based on distance from the office, which doesn't seem fair or equitable - I'm wondering is this even legal?

Anaki r2d2

You won't like this, but if you check your contract, I would imagine it defines your normal place of work.

The employer can insist you come back to the office 5 days a week. March 2020 was emergency measures, and that's behind us thankfully.

The postive though in a time of full employment employers can't get staff never minding afford to loose good staff.

Del2005

If it's not one of the protected statuses then it's not illegal to discriminate. Distance from workplace isn't a protected status.

Augme

You could refuse and see what happens. It does create an interesting situation, while the employer isn't breaking any particular law by having this rule in place I do wonder how successful they would be in trying to enforce it through disciplinary action to those who aren't abidding by it.

KaneToad

I'd use the address of someone who lives far away from the office. Say you had to move for personal reasons & marital/relationship difficulties.

magoo84

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121480363#Comment_121480363

That's true, except all of our contracts will say the same thing, so with that in mind, asking some staff to return, but not others, amounts to special treatment i.e. discrimination. In reality, I don't think it's enforceable, because the majority of staff live outside the county of the office, and they have already told me privately they aren't coming back. Some of them also moved further away from the office after COVID started.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121480420#Comment_121480420

If your contract states you have to be in the office, the employer can enforce it.

Whether they enforce it equally is largely irrelevant.

If people moved further away from the office during Covid, thats their issue to deal with.

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121480420#Comment_121480420

Discrimination by itself isn't illegal. If a company wanted to only hire people who prefer cats to dogs (for example), they're perfectly entitled to do that. As above, there are nine specific grounds which you can't discriminate - everything else is allowed (except where used as indirect discrimination for one of the nine grounds). There's no legal argument there.

That doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. If there's twenty of you involved, and 15 say with one voice that you're not going to go back to the office, the company may well take the view that allowing you to work from home is less painful than hiring 15 new employees. If there's two or three of you, they may prefer to just get rid. There are a lot of variables involved, and nobody on here is going to have as much insight into the situation as you

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121480420#Comment_121480420

The only definition of discrimination that is is valid is the legal one and it does not cover your situation. So yes your contract can be enforced and if refuse to turn up, then you will be in breach of contract and you'll just have to wait and see how the employer reacts.

ELM327

Generally (and I've moved jobs twice this year), people will leave if there is mandated RTO. Some companies use this to avoid paying redundancies as it increases natural attrition at the cost of morale.

Mrs OBumble

You also need to think about why your employer is doing this.

It may be to increase natural attrition. Or it may be because overall company effectiveness is not what it should be with you all offsite.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121481879#Comment_121481879

3 yrs later. Oh yeah its the remote working lol.

Mrs OBumble

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121485377#Comment_121485377

So why do you think the employer is now making this request?

Your guess is as good as mine here.

Flinty997

That they are making this major decision based on distance. Which has nothing to do with "effectiveness". Says all you need to know right there.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121481879#Comment_121481879

I'm going to hazard a guess that the aim is not to increase natural attrition; in fact the employer may want to minimise this. According to what the OP has heard, decisions about who will be required to work in the office will be based (no doubt, among other factors) on distance. I take this to mean that, the closer you live to the office, the more likely you are to be required to work in the office.

One obvious explanation for this is that the employer wants at least a critical mass/a certain proportion of the workforce to be working from the office (and we can conjecture plausible reasons why he might want this, but we'd just be guessing) but who actually does this is a secondary consideration. So he asks the people who live the closest, who will be inconvenienced the least, to work from the office. If he wanted to increase attrition in the workforce, he'a ask the people who would be inconvenienced the most.

Mrs OBumble

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121493220#Comment_121493220

So why do you think the employer is asking people to come in?

Flinty997

The convenience is not simply about commuting distance. That's a very simplistic way of looking at it, and doesn't make a lot of sense. Can't see any HR dept suggesting that.

It's could be it's facilitating some of the senior management to stay remote working while dragging the majority of people back into the office.

Though even that doesn't make sense. They could simply have individual arrangements. Which likely happened before lockdown anyway.

Yeah Right

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121481879#Comment_121481879

100% of the time that I have seen this enforced over the past year or two, it's because of middle managers not having the power they used to. People were so used to acting like schoolteachers, hovering around desks/offices, checking up on all the perceived minor indiscretions, trying to catch staff out on X, Y or Z technicality. Busybodies, whose sole job was to keep everyone else in line, who now realise that their entire role is redundant, because people can be (largely) trusted to do their job and those that can't get found out quickly.

The top brass don't give a monkeys once the work is done. The guys in the middle are panicking, because if you the staff at the coalface don't need to be managed then they don't need managers. WFH has gladly been the death knell for the micromanagers and the mini-Hitlers who ruled with an iron fist and who've seen their empire crumble to dust before them. The fight to get everyone back to the office has ALWAYS come from someone who realised their necks are on the chopping block.

And I honestly mean 100%. Multiple grades, from all manner of firms/companies/departments, from all walks of the professional life. One example.....

A newly-promoted guy in my last job threatened to put a colleague on a PIP because his out of office wasn't set properly. He wanted your man to be back in the office 100% of the time for three months because of it, adding 4 hrs to his workday every single day.

Turns out, it was the promoted guy's manager (who was also his predecessor) who was driving all of this, and told the new guy that this was a great way to keep everyone on their toes, show upper management that he was a ball-buster and it would be a great example of how he had disciplined an underperforming employee and rectified the situation, even if it didn't need rectifying in the first place.

He accidentally copied the 'underperforming' employee on the email, who left and sued for constructive dismissal. Both managers were fired.

If the company wasn't performing well because of remote working, it would have been identified well before now. Nobody waits three years to see if it's an anomaly. They are either trying to whittle the numbers down or it's someone who has come to the conclusion that their job is fecking meaningless and they're gonna start chopping off heads before theirs gets chopped off.

Flinty997

I don't see any pattern to it other then people changing it for change sake.

After all thats said, if its in your contract, you're snookered, and they enforce it.

A compromise might be hybrid working. If you can get that over the line.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121493978#Comment_121493978

We're there any press reports of the unfair dismissal case?

Yeah Right

Not sure if it's been heard yet, I moved job soon enough after. Don't really keep in touch with any of them.

Mrs OBumble

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121493978#Comment_121493978

Remote working is a lot more effort for middle managers: they have to do a lot more checks to make sure that not only is the work getting done, but the company and industry compliance requirements are met.

If anything, they want people back because it makes their job easier.

Trampas

3 years later they’ve still not managed to figured out how to manage people without standing over their shoulders. Maybe they should approach their reporting line on training to manage people who are in different locations. Of course it’s the person doing the work who’s fault it is that their manager can’t manage them without them in earshot

Frank Bullitt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121498586#Comment_121498586

What checks? If the work is getting done then why does anything need to be checked?

Most companies now want folks back in offices due to an existing lease, which can be seen as a liability to shareholders if it is sitting empty. Others are just following the trend being set by bigger companies (who again, have large leases).

It obviously isn't for the sake of productivity. That has long since been proven otherwise.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121498586#Comment_121498586

Sounds very efficient. Lots of middle managers checking stuff that should check itself.

https://twitter.com/_workchronicles/status/1734974065167696036

bucketybuck

Is it not very naive to convince yourselves that all these successful companies want a return to offices simply because they are big dumb dumbs?

Like, think that if you want, but just because some want to sit in pyjamas all day doesn't mean that a hell of a lot of business owners aren't allowed to have a different opinion.

I think a lot of you live in some IT bubble where everything is cliche middle managers and HR departments. Fact is, there are a lot of businesses out there that see tangible benefits to having people in office and have decided that if they are paying for everything, then thats what they want to happen.

Leave them and go elsewhere if you disagree, that is your right, but it is foolish to just assume that they are stupid and wrong.

caviardreams

The blame-the-manager vitriol that some WFH advocates adopt hints at more than a little bit of deflection and people who don't like the idea of accountability - the old "accountability is micromanagement" trope is alive and well

Flinty997

If someone actually described valid use cases where you need to be there in person, instead of bumbling example of ineptitude they wouldn't get lambasted. Perhaps you might have a point. But mostly they don't. Same with nonsensical HR policies. If it looks like a duck, its probably a duck.

RTO office is simple, its either in your contract or it isn't. If you don't like it, vote with your feet. It will either cause a retention issue or it won't.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121500969#Comment_121500969

You have to have a thin skin, if you think a few quips about micro management, is vitriol. Or its hit a nerve.

Quin_Dub

I think a lot of companies are finding that while fully remote works well for established staff , new hires and especially those new to the workforce in general find it quite difficult.

As time passes since the Covid WFH experiment a larger and larger % of staff at some companies have never worked in a full office and that is presenting challenges in terms of helping them establish their networks and to learn from peers about how everything works together etc.

In my own firm over 25% of staff have joined the company since Covid so that's a very large number of people lacking that "wisdom of the crowd" as it were from the company tribal knowledgebase.

Companies however are struggling to actually find a way to solve that without pissing off all the staff that are perfectly happy and effective at home.

Blanket demands for mandatory numbers of days in the office aren't the answer , but I'm sure they really know what else to do.

I suspect it will be a period of blunt instrument enforcement and then a more nuanced approach will eventually settle in , but it will take a bit of time.

caviardreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121501163#Comment_121501163

Anyway, away from the deflection again and back to the issue

If you think managers don't need to check in on deliverables and output progress because it all just gets magically done on time by every single remote worker than you must be incredibly lucky with your recruitment and current crop of reports. Not everyone is that fortunate