After implementing return-to-office mandates, S&P 500 companies experienced “abnormally high” employee turnover and longer time-to-hire when filling job vacancies, according to new research from the University of Pittsburgh.
The increase in turnover rates was more pronounced among women, senior employees and more skilled workers, the researchers found.
“These results are consistent with firms losing their best talent and female employees and facing greater difficulties with talent attraction after RTO mandates,” the study authors wrote. “Our study highlights brain drain as a significant cost of RTO mandates, even for the largest firms in the world.”
Earlier in 2024, the researchers found RTO mandates not only hurt employee satisfaction but also failed to boost company profits, concluding that “managers use RTO for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance.”
In this study, the research team tracked more than 3 million tech and finance workers’ employment histories on LinkedIn to analyze the effect of RTO policies across S&P 500 firms.
Beyond the high turnover and slow hiring, the researchers found firms’ hire rates also significantly decreased after RTO mandates. On average, the time to fill job vacancies increased 23%, and the hire rate decreased 17% after RTO mandates.
Mimicking private company trends, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy recently called for RTO mandates for the federal workforce to prompt “voluntary terminations.” The future leaders of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency said planned reductions in federal regulations “[provide] sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”
As RTO mandates increase, 1 in 5 workers say they don’t follow their company’s RTO rules, according to a Resume Builder report from October. Most workers said they only want to be in the office for three or fewer days per week, and half said they’d quit if their company enforced RTO compliance.
Despite post-RTO attrition, 70% of companies said they’d increase or maintain in-office days in 2025, according to another Resume Builder survey. About 80% of employers said they lost talent due to RTO mandates, yet 25% said they planned to increase in-person work requirements.