The RTO crossroads

Banks are rolling out RTO mandates and pushing for increased in-office presence. But is anyone listening?

OVER THE LAST month or two, major Canadian banks have been turning the screw on their RTO mandates. In early June, Scotiabank announced a four-day in-office requirement. RBC did the same thing last month.

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The announcements came with the now-boilerplate justifications: “Spending more time together in the office enables more effective collaboration and problem-solving and ultimately provides more opportunities to develop one’s career,” a Scotiabank memo to staff said.

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Some are praising it. “For banks, a return to office is critical to achieve optimal productivity,” wrote the Globe’s John Turley-Ewart.

Okay, but will it actually work? Not as in, will it make employees more productive ― but will the mandates make people come back to the office? That’s where the data paints a more complicated picture.

The Flex Index, a project from WFH thought leader and Stanford professor Nick Bloom that purports to offer a modelled estimate of actual office attendance among large corporations and financial institutions, has keyed in on an interesting piece of information: when it comes to office attendance, a clear compliance gap exists. “While required office days have increased 10 per cent since Q1 2024, attendance has fluctuated between one and two per cent higher,” the data found. For all of the investment being made in improving office attendance, the result, said Bloom, is attendance that is “flat as a pancake.” 

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There’s a couple of interesting explanations for this. One is that good employees have enough inherent leverage to basically ignore the mandates “Managers facing pressure to ‘do more with less’ are unlikely to terminate high-performing employees whose only shortcoming is imperfect attendance,” wrote Brian Elliot. “The silent agreement between managers and their best talent is evident.”

Another sticking point is the offices themselves. “Staff believe bank leaders have not made the transition back to the office easy,” wrote Turley-Ewart, noting that staff are irritated with hot desking and desk hotelling. “When bank CEOs make that ultimate call to their employees to return to the office, it is their job to offer offices that staff want to return to.” Kieran Delamont