In Part 2 of our insightful Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Glass, we explore the implications of return-to-office (RTO) mandates and their impact on working parents, talent retention, and organizational culture. Dr. Glass shares her research-driven insights into the unintended consequences of rigid RTO policies and offers practical guidance for HR leaders seeking to balance workplace flexibility with productivity. She also discusses the emerging challenges in work-family dynamics and highlights key trends shaping the future workforce, particularly as organizations attempt to attract and retain young talent amidst changing generational values.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity.
Based on your research, many working parents experienced greater productivity and job satisfaction while working from home, as it allowed them to better manage their children’s schedules. With the current rise in RTO mandates, how can HR ensure that decisions about returning to the office are made equitably?
I think companies need to stay away from management, consultants, and other people who tell them unfounded truths. They’ll say, “Look, you’re going to get greater innovation, new ideas, and creativity if you force everybody back into the office.”
I don’t think that’s true.
It might be true in some narrow sectors of tech where you have joint projects with people who have different types of technical expertise, and they interact with each other all the time. But most organizations don’t work that way. I think we’ve taken too much of that narrow literature and like generalized it to everybody.
We haven’t taken a really good look at the kinds of talent you lose when you put in an RTO order, mostly because we haven’t had the data yet.
Who’s quitting? Are they really replaceable? Have you in fact increased productivity and dynamism and innovation with your return to work?
CEOs don’t live the lives of their employees. They have all kinds of support systems in place that their employees don’t have, and they cannot imagine who they are losing. They assume they’ll only be losing the worst talent.
That’s not true.
They’re going to lose the best talent because those are the people who have options to go elsewhere.
You’re not going to lose the people who don’t have options. They’re going to stay.
There are a lot of internal dynamics within organizations that get set up by senior management who don’t have any work or family issues, and who are embedded in “bro culture” and think that it’s just fine to put in these return-to-work orders that totally dismiss the idea that they can get better talent and keep better talent for longer if they maintain flexibility.
Back to Normal?
I always tell the anecdote of being a university professor, so I’ve always had the option to work from home or to work in the office. Some of my colleagues only work in the office because they’re distracted at home. Some people, like me, can’t work in the office. I’m always disrupted. Someone’s always knocking on my door and I’m someone who needs a long, flat stretch of time to get into my work and not be interrupted.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is that even when I am in my office, and my collaborator is literally right next door, I email her. I don’t go knock on her door and interrupt her. I e-mail her, or I send her a text message.
My graduate students are right down the hall, but I do almost all my communication with my research assistants by e-mail or text. We might meet in person once every couple of weeks, or we Zoom. I travel a lot for my job. I’m constantly doing things while I’m on the road, so there are many ways in which the move to off-site has made my work better, not worse. Now I can collaborate with people who are not physically at my university. I can collaborate with people in all kinds of different teams at other universities, and that has enriched my work to the nth degree.
I understand companies are not the same. They may not want you to collaborate with people in other companies, but many companies are multinational or multilateral. They have different sites around the country. You’re going to be much more productive if you have access to all those people than if you’re only talking to the people at your one work site.
Decisions on Assumptions or Facts?
There are a lot of unspoken assumptions about what the return to work is going to do. Very few of them are based on solid management research, and that’s what I think is most confounding.
Clearly, this is going to have a huge impact on parents, and it’s going to have a huge impact on mothers.
Maybe they don’t care. Some other competitors will get them.
The other thing is that if you treat your employees well during short periods of time, they may be willing to compromise when you need them the most. If you give people the option of working from home, but you say, “Hey, we need all hands on deck for the next month to finish X,” maybe everybody is more likely to say, “Okay, I’ll come in for a month.” More so than if you say, “The only way you can keep your job is to come in all day, every day for the rest of your life.
I always encourage employers to be strategic and flexible, not dogmatic.
And Bezos is going to be in trouble if he loses a lot of his great Amazon employees through this return-to-work order. Now a lot of cynics have said, “This is really just a way to shed load. They want to get rid of employees, and they don’t want to lay people off.”
That’s a terrible way to engage in layoffs because it’s completely arbitrary. You’re not laying off people based on function. You’re just laying off people based on whether they get frustrated with you or not.
Again, chances are your best talent is the one that’s going to get frustrated and leave. Your worst talent might get frustrated, but they’re not going to leave.
Leadership Circles and Their Bias
My university recently implemented an RTO, and I was very surprised.
It doesn’t affect faculty; it only affects staff, but it’s also ridiculous because many of our staff members are researchers. I was trying to figure out the origin of this, and it turned out the origin was in one consultant who had a very, very close ear to decision-makers who pressured the administration into making this decision.
Sometimes these networks are very tight and very closed, and you don’t know when decisions are being made, so you can’t give a lot of input if you’re on the other side. This has been a crisis in organizations since the 1960s. It’s even got a word. It’s called groupthink, and it’s a group in most organizations.
You see it in management education all the time, but it’s very difficult to get away from the sycophants who are just going to tell you what you want to hear. No one wants to be the person who tells the boss they’re making a big mistake. It’s hard to get people to be honest and critical with you. What happens is people tend to swirl in this same pool of like-minded thinkers, and those messages get reinforced over and over again.
“Return to work mandates are important. Our productivity is slipping because people aren’t in the office.”
Well, your productivity may be slipping, but where’s the evidence that it’s because people are not in the office? The links between the evidence and the outcome are weak.
But it seems to fit the mindset of those people at the top who are the decision-makers. “Well, I’m here at work, so I want everybody else to be around me.”
Is that really going to increase the productivity of your business?
What emerging issues in the realm of work-family dynamics and gender stratification do you believe HR leaders should be paying close attention to in the coming years?
The HR professional’s main concern is how do they keep their employees happy enough that turnover is relatively low, and they can keep their talent. From that point of view, the message has really been clear that the shift in the college degree holders favors women at this point.
If I were an HR professional, I would be focusing on that very carefully, especially when trying to recruit and retain educated workers. If I’m not trying to recruit and retain educated workers, I have a whole other can of worms. That is, for our non-college-educated workforce, wages are too low to motivate performance, and workers are generally under a series of distressing lack of support when it comes to the school year and the timing of school days, publicly provided childcare, health insurance, and getting quality health care.
So, my employees would be facing a whole host of issues making it more difficult for them to be high-quality employees.
This whole business of work-family reconciliation is not going to go away. The number of new entrants into the labor force is going to decline significantly because of declining fertility over the next 10 to 15 years or so.
They’re going to have to figure out creative ways to get the employees they want into the firm and to keep them happy there.
Workforce Values See a Generational Shift
the pressure on young people is greater now than it has ever been before. If companies don’t figure out a way to cooperate with them rather than antagonize them, they’re going to be outcompeted both by international firms and by firms within the US who do a better job of motivating work-life balance.
I talk to young people a lot, and there are so many more than when I was young who are willing to say, “I’m not going to take that high-paying job because they require too much of my private time,” or, “I’m not going to take that job because it’s in a terrible part of the country where I don’t think I could ever meet a life partner and raise a family.”
Those kinds of issues are really at the forefront of Gen Z. As long as those are the only, “cheap, new workers” entering the labor force, they’ll have to do more to attract and retain them.
They’re also much more interested in self-employment. They are less motivated, I think, by money than previous generations of college students.
It’s happening globally. Japan is having the same struggles.
We’ve been in this boat for a couple of generations now, and people have just looked around and said, “No, I don’t want to sacrifice my entire life for an employer who could cut me off or lay me off at any point in time. Not going to happen.”
Building Workplaces for the Future
Dr. Glass’s perspective offers HR leaders much-needed clarity on navigating RTO policies, recognizing cognitive biases, and fostering workplace environments that attract and retain top talent. As organizations face increasing pressure to adapt to the demands of a new workforce, flexibility, thoughtful decision-making, and an emphasis on work-life balance will be critical. The insights shared in this Q&A remind us that strategic foresight, employee well-being, and inclusive leadership must remain at the core of HR strategies in the years ahead.
