Okay, now we’ve heard everything…
Until recently, return-to-office mandates have been THE business trend of the past couple of years, despite the lack of evidence that working in the office is any better for productivity.
And a recent story on Reddit shows that the grasping at straws to justify returning to the office has reached full-on crisis levels. One worker’s boss issued an RTO for a reason so patently absurd it sounds like it must have come directly from the writer’s room of “The Office.”
The boss issued a return-to-office mandate because a worker cut their finger while working from home.
Now. come on. Really? REALLY? THIS is where the world’s supposed greatest business minds are going?!
This is a great time to remind you that there is as yet no real compelling evidence that returning to office boosts productivity or saves money, and most studies showing that it does have been commissioned by those with ties to commercial real estate.
So, okay — given those circumstances, bosses kinda have to make stuff up to sell their RTOs. Fine! But issuing a mandate because someone cut their finger? This is what we’re doing?! Is this the corporate business world or a particularly inept farce dreamed up by the underachieving students of a sketch comedy class?
The worker in question took to Reddit to share that it is, believe it or not, the actual excuse their boss used. “So I was making lunch at home and cut my finger,” they wrote. They went on to explain that since they live in Canada, “we have good health insurance in this country so I had it stitched up and it didn’t cost me anything.” That could and should have been the end of it. But, of course, it wasn’t.
The boss made the decision to issue an RTO because HR’s meddling in the worker’s injury cost the company tons of money.
Now, if you thought this story was stupid on its face, here’s where it gets even stupider. “Next day I was in the office and the colleagues asked what happened and I told them,” the worker wrote.
This perked up the ears of HR, which is not really surprising because, with all due respect to the HR profession, unnecessarily meddling in affairs that don’t concern them is pretty much the job description of most HR people.
Case in point! “(HR) decided that since (the injury) was during office hours, it was a work-related accident and went through the trouble of reporting it, and the lawyers had to get involved.” Now come on, HR, why are you wasting time on this? Don’t you have a harassment complaint to ignore and blame on the victim?!
Anyway, as tends to happen when HR gets involved in anything, let alone when lawyers do, this simple incident of a person cutting their finger while making their lunch became “so complicated” — and expensive — for literally no reason. As the worker put it, “It didn’t cost anything to just keep it ‘personal,’ but to change the report and insurance claim, etc., cost the company quite a bit.”
And once ol’ Bossman heard about it, there was only one solution. “A week later the boss announces that WFH is no longer allowed due to insurance complications,” the worker wrote. “It’s clear that they were looking for a reason to get us all back in the office but I never expected that I would be it.”
The return-to-office trend has recently shown signs of abating mainly because it has backfired spectacularly.
You may have noticed you’ve heard fewer news and social media stories about RTOs in recent months, and that’s for one reason — companies are pulling back because the RTO trend has, for the most part, been a giant failure, just like tons of experts and studies said it would.
The fact that the commercial real estate business, to which many boosters of RTOs have financial connections, has somewhat stabilized is surely part of it. But only part of it. A survey by office tech company Zoomfor instance, showed that 82% of business leaders plan to make a 180 on RTOs and make their companies’ work schedules MORE flexible over the next two years, not less.
So, what has made them finally give in? Exactly what scientists and experts warned about: Leaders have found that RTOs simply haven’t been worth the conflict they’ve caused both among leadership and between leaders and employees rightfully furious about being forced to sacrifice their work-life balance for no justifiable reason.
HR research firm Gartner found that 74% of HR leaders say RTOs have caused intense strife and led to too many resignations and high rates of intention to resign among their best-performing employees — which costs companies tons of money. A majority also reported that RTOs have not improved performance or inclusion.
So it’s likely that this worker’s boss is about to learn the hard way how dimwitted their RTO mandate decision is on its face, let alone the fact they did it because of something in an employee’s private life they had no need to even get involved in.
It will never cease to be astonishing that the people who are supposedly the greatest business minds on Earth are so prone to tripping over their own feet in such absurd ways. But at least it gives those of us who know better something to laugh about.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
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