Totally anecdotal, but from what I have seen, people are willing to take a 20-30% pay cut if the new opportunity provides remote or better flexibility.

In other words if your company is paying way too much money as compared to the market, people would think they want to leave, but won’t. But if you’re a company that is at market or slightly above market, and you’re enforcing mandatory RTO, you are in trouble, you just don’t know it yet.

n=1. Out of roughly 8 colleagues (mix of infosec, IT, networking), all sought employment elsewhere when RTOd and were able to find remote jobs at higher pay within 2-3 weeks. Those who left pulled others with in some cases. Agree talk is cheap, so you've gotta make someone find out when they fuck around. If the org hurts or burns due to poor management, that is a management problem. Manage better. It is a choice.

Always be interviewing, always be ready to move on. If you want loyalty, get a dog.

Maybe, but people have learned to value their lives outside of work more than they once did; spending time with family and living outside of a big city (if that's what you want) is a huge draw for people like me.

Sample size of one, but I've thought about this a lot, and I decided I would hand in my notice if my company unilaterally demanded I physically present myself in a building for several days per week. I've never worked on-site in this job, and been consistently ranked highly in terms of productivity and responsibility.

You are almost certainly right, but morale would drop and quite a few would jump.

The younger generations would sabotage us from within if we tried this. We've already had a couple "silent" rebellions from "zoomers" and even "millenials".

It's astounding not worth the risk for my firm except for certain teams.

I'm not sure what "'silent' rebellions" you're referring to. The only one I can think of is "silent quitting" which isn't quitting so much as it is not being willingly taken advantage of by working unpaid hours or doing unpaid work.

don't forget unpaid interns

"Lazy Girl Tiktok", "Quiet Quitting", there seems to be a new variant every week on various social media.

We've even had outright sabotage because one of clients was disliked by an employee.

It's getting ridiculous to keep track off.

It's not the same thing but...

We've had 2 of 3 engineering role candidates we recently made offers to decline citing our 3 days a week in office policy...

Are you not advertising that it's 60% in-office? It seems surprising that multiple people would see that and go the whole way to an offer without self-selecting out.

We are.

I think in both cases people were selecting between us and another job. One said he was taking another job for 10k LESS (GBP) but full remote.

(As always, the stated reasons might not be accurate)

The cost of maintaining transportation and the unpaid hours from a commute are quite significant. Depending upon their circumstances they could be taking home more money even being paid less.

100% this.

Here in the UK, just not having to live near London will save you enormous amounts on rent/mortgage as well.

I'm in the office full time (I actually need to be) and I pay 700 a month just in rent on a crappy room not too close to central. That alone is the equivalent of about £17k before tax, and I am a single guy who doesn't mind housemates. No thanks.

It seems likely that candidates are comparing offers, which requires them to get a decent amount of the way through the hiring process.

As always, the people with the most options and who are most in demand will be the ones to leave first. I've seen this firsthand.

Then you're left with the worst people, people who are unhappy but stuck, and people who just can't be bothered to do anything about it.

Sounds like a great recipe for productivity! I love working with my fellow cage-mates.

The least talented people will likely stick around because finding alternative employment is more challenging for them. That's disastrous for morale.

> That's disastrous for morale.

At some point, nobody will care or only the people that won't bother doing anything about it will care.

I don't think morale is the right metric to use here.

Some will go in, others will quit and then end up finding a different job that also requires them to go in, some will find a crappier job that lets them stay remote, and a few will win the lottery.

A different job that lets me remote, for the same pay, costs me much less… if they want me to come in, they can offer me to expense transportation and consider travel time as work.

I've hired someone who lives 2 hours drive from the office.

When they were hired during the pandemic, it was agreed there would be an eventual return to the office at an unknown time in the future. They'd been planning a move to my (high-salary, high-cost-of-living) area before the pandemic, so that was just fine with them.

Now it's several years later. If I order a full return to the office they'll have a choice: Either move house, or move jobs.

Selling a house and buying a new one costs $$$$$ and is a huge hassle.

Seems to me pretty believable that they'd look at other jobs if a full return to office was ordered.