What companies are getting wrong about RTO, according to a former Google leader

This year has ushered in a more robust return to the office, with companies across industries now putting an end to remote work for most employees. The likes of Amazon, UPS, and Boeing are now requiring workers to be in the office five days a week, along with several banks and finance companies. Walmart has required that corporate employees not only return to the office, but also relocate to the retail giant’s headquarters in Arkansas.

These edicts have faced significant pushback from employees, some of whom have threatened to quit. Many workers have been frustrated by the loss of flexibility they enjoyed since the pandemic upended how we work. But another recurring complaint has been that companies often offer little explanation—and notice, in some cases—for their decision to bring people back to the office.

It’s an issue that AJ Thomas often raises when she advises startups and other companies. Thomas—who was formerly the head of talent at Google’s “moonshot factory” and continues to advise there—has worked across talent, product, and teams and now runs her own coaching firm. (She is also a CXO in residence at tech hiring platform A. Team and the founder of the venture capital fund, Good Trouble Ventures.) In an interview with Fast Company, Thomas talked about what companies are getting wrong with their messaging around RTO and what they should be considering before rolling out a strict in-office mandate—including the impact on marginalized employees. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The return-to-office push is obviously not new. But there has been a change in the kinds of mandates we’re seeing, with companies asking people to come into the office full time. What do you make of this shift and the pushback companies have received from employees?

It’s now a pull, not a push. I think we’re actually focusing on the wrong thing. It’s not about returning to the office. It’s really about, What is the work you’re returning to that requires for you to be in the office? In my time at the moonshot factory, we had robotics and hardware and experiments and wet labs—and all of these spaces where we needed to have people come in.

For me, it’s just, What is the job that is required? I don’t think organizations have gotten really good at articulating that, which is why they’re getting the pushback. Companies [think], Well, this is the way that we need to work.

My view on it—advising different CEOs, startups, and teams, and coaching individuals as they’re working through this—is really to just get crisp around the problem that they’re solving for. It has to be based around the principles of what that organization is trying to get done.

The blanket messages really do a disservice. Companies—especially HR leaders and the C-suite—have to get really good at personalizing the message and having it be both inclusive and accessible. Inclusivity, for me, means: Here are the principles by which we decided this. Here are the top priorities that we have. Based on these priorities, here are the skills and the areas in which we will need people either in office, remote, or hybrid. You create the infrastructure for that. And then you say, Okay, let’s communicate this to make sure that people understand.

Are there any companies that you think have articulated the rationale behind their return to office mandates more clearly?

Roblox did a really great job in how they talked about bringing everybody back to the office. What they did was they said, Hey, look, this is our mandate. We want people to be co-located and in the office most of the time. Everybody who has moved out—we want to give you the option. If you want to relocate, we will pay for that. If you don’t want to stay, we will give you two quarters to find a new role and then severance.

They had a whole policy and a process to make sure it was an inclusive decision. What mattered to them was the culture they were trying to preserve. So it didn’t become: Do it, or else. It was, Look, we need to do this. This is the goal. For us to be thoughtful about the workplace culture that we’re trying to put together, we have these options for you.

You don’t want somebody going in because they feel obligated to. [And] you don’t want somebody because they have to. You want somebody because they want to. And the companies that I see doing this well are articulating the work.

We have a sense of what is driving the decision to go back to the office full time. But it seems like a real risk, especially for companies that are trying to retain top performers or employees who need more flexibility. What do you think could be the impact of these mandates?

As an employee, you will weed out if it’s right for you. And as an employer, you will weed out if you actually have people who are just staying and quitting—[people who say,] Okay, I need the paycheck, so I’m coming back five days a week.

Something’s going to give—and what’s going to give is performance. There’s going to be a dip in performance because of the mental health toll and physical [and] emotional toll that employees are going through. And you will run the risk of top performers maybe leaving because that’s not what they want. You want to look at the design of your system. What is the data? If [of] the top 10% of the company, 8% already work remotely, there’s probably something there. [If your] policy is saying they need to come back to the office five days a week, that doesn’t quite match.

A broad brush policy—everybody comes back or else we’re going to track all your badging—just instills fear that’s unnecessary. As an organization, I have to cater to the persona of my customer. My customer is the employee waking up every day, choosing my company to do the work I need [them] to do. So I think we need to think about that organizationally as people leaders. We always say that people are the largest bottom-line cost and expense that we have. But they are also our customers.

What do you think is being left out of the conversation around return-to-work mandates?

The thing that we are not focusing on enough is the part of the population that now had accessibility to this flexibility because of the pandemic. Folks who are differently abled [who] thrive in a virtual environment. Working moms or single working parents who have to juggle many different things.

I just don’t think we’ve had enough dialogue around: What are the new ways in which work happens? Because we are now more aware that people actually have lives outside of work. Who are the most marginalized employees when it comes to this kind of policy? What are their needs, and how do you design for that?

Is there any other advice you would give to companies that are looking to bring employees back into the office full time?

Is return to office really the problem you’re solving for? Or is it high performance? Because those are two different things. If it’s just return to office, you’re going to be okay with getting 100% return to office but a 52% engagement rate. But if it is about high performance, then you’re going to redesign your systems to get to whatever that goal is. If you care about return to office? You can get an outcome of a return to office, but you [will] get a totally different barometer of impact if you’re not clear on what you’re incentivizing.

I’ll leave you with this. Thinking about culture as a product: In the tech space, as an analog, there is usually a tech stack you’re working with. There’s an operating system, an application layer, and a feature layer. If you think about these layers, the operating system is analog to your mission, vision, and values as an organization.

The application layer are the teams that need to execute to make the operating system come to life, and the features are things like RTO, policies, revenue, OKRs, etc. I find most of the great teams debug at the operating-system layer. If you’re just going in and tacking another feature on top of a broken operating system, then your application layer is going to be screwed 100% of the time because the teams aren’t going to understand what command to execute on. We just [have to] debug at that operating-system layer.