Companies are monitoring whether employees adhere to corporate return-to-office (RTO) policies and are enforcing the requirements more than they have in the past five years, according to a report that commercial real estate firm CBRE will release next week and that Ars Technica reviewed.
CBRE surveyed 184 companies for its report. Among companies surveyed, 69 percent are monitoring whether employees come into the office as frequently as policy mandates. That’s an increase from 45 percent last year.
Seventy-three percent of companies surveyed said that employees are coming into the office as frequently as their employer wants, which is an increase from 61 percent last year. The average number of days required in-office by companies surveyed was 3.2 days, but actual in-office attendance on average is 2.9 days or, at companies with 10,000 or more employees, 2.5 days.
Meanwhile, the share of companies that said they are enforcing in-office attendance policies more than doubled, from 17 percent last year to 37 percent this year.
Enforcing RTO policies is a way to ensure that corporate rules are followed and that some employees aren’t working remotely more frequently than their coworkers without permission. However, some have criticized employer techniques for tracking in-office attendance as babying employees and demonstrating an unwarranted lack of trust.
For example, Dell has reportedly tracked VPN usage and badge swipes, frustrating some workers. Amazon, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Meta have also reportedly tracked badge swipes, and TikTok reportedly started an app to monitor badge swipes and contact workers who didn’t go into the office when expected. We’ve also seen companies tell employees that they would be ineligible for bonuses or promotions if they didn’t adhere to RTO policies.
Speaking with CNBC, Manish Kashyap, CBRE’s global president of leasing, said:
I think it was pretty loosey-goosey for the last year or two, and I think the companies have got a lot better at that right now. They’re coming up with policies that allow hybrid structures and allow flexibility, but whatever their new policy is, their implementation around that, and the governance around that, is definitely a lot better.
But while many companies have taken to monitoring employee behavior for the sake of RTO rules, others are using the remote work culture fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic as leverage for recruiting and keeping employees.
For example, while high-profile banks like JPMorgan Chase and HSBC have started enforcing in-office policies, London-headquartered bank Standard Chartered is letting managers and individual employees decide how often workers are expected in-office. In July, Standard CEO Bill Winters told Bloomberg Television:
We work with adults. The adults can have an adult conversation with other adults and decide how they’re going to best manage their team.
The differing management methods come as numerous corporations have pointed to in-office work as driving collaboration, ideation, and, in some cases, revenue, while numerous studies point to RTO policies hurting employee morale and risking employee retention.
“There are some markets where there’s effectively peer pressure to come in more often, and there’s other markets where there’s less of that,” Winters said. “People come into the office because they want to come into the office.”
Office space
After the COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses to figure out how to function with remote workers, there was speculation that the commercial real estate business would seriously suffer long-term. CNBC reported that the US office vacancy rate (18.9 percent) is currently near the highest we’ve seen in 30 years (19 percent).
However, CBRE, which has big stakes here, found that out of the companies it surveyed, more are planning to expand office space than reduce it. Per the report, 67 percent of companies said they will expand or maintain the size of their office space over the next three years, compared to 64 percent last year. Thirty-three percent of respondents overall said they will reduce office space; however, among companies with at least 10,000 employees, 60 percent are planning to downsize. Among the companies planning to downsize, 79 percent said they are doing so because more hybrid work means that they need less space.
“Employers are much more focused now than they were pre-pandemic on quality of workplace experience, the efficiency of seat sharing, and the vibrancy of the districts in which they’re located,” Julie Whelan, CBRE’s global head of occupier research, told CNBC.
Although tariffs and broader economic uncertainty is turning some corporations away from long-term real estate decisions, Whelan said many firms are ready to make decisions about office space, "even if there’s a little bit of economic uncertainty right now.”
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