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No-one likes a return to office (RTO) mandate – well, beyond bosses at banks and tech giants. But hybrid working is widely welcomed by a majority of employees, according to survey after survey.
That hasn’t stopped micromanaging bosses from stamping their feet and demanding their way, including industry giants like Amazon and JP Morgan. There are plenty others who don’t make the headlines, of course.
What can be done if you don’t want to RTO for five days a week? Plenty quit or start looking for a new role. But if that’s not an option, there’s a new workplace trend for inspiration: Revenge RTO.
Revenge RTO isn’t one single action: it’s more a vibe and an attitude designed to make bosses regret having these employees in the office.
In one example, reported by Fortune, a staffer forced to head in only a few days a week retaliated by swinging by the office fridge to nick soft drinks and snacks supplied by the company as an in-office perk. “I keep my home fridge fully stocked with all of my office drinks,” she told the publication.
Other examples include scheduling constant, unnecessary meetings or socialising all day – hey, collaborating is one of the benefits of being in the same place, right? Refuse to pick up the phone or answer Slack messages when out of the office or even in the office. Instead, make them come talk to you, that’s why you travelled all the way in, after all.
Others don’t clock out for lunch, billing the company for the time, or disappear in the afternoon for a yoga class or doctor’s appointment (real or made up). Some arrive late every day, blaming the commute, while others leave on time regardless of workload or even if they’re in the middle of a meeting.
Some versions of revenge RTO are even more petty, constantly interrupting bosses’ work, demanding a new chair or desk, talking loudly on calls and having smelly lunches. And there’s always the time-honoured tradition of stealing office supplies.
Some suggest that Revenge RTO is childish. Well, duh. But so is demanding adults be in a certain place to work when they’d prefer to toil elsewhere.
As Denise Rousseau, a professor of organisational behaviour at Carnegie Mellon, told Fortune that companies broke the social contract first, and staff are replying in kind via “counterproductive work behaviour”.
She added: “The precursors are unfair treatment, broken promises, or perceptions of an employer who does not have the workers’ interests at heart. If this behavior is increasing, it’s because employers have violated some implicit agreement.”
In other words, managers started it, and it’s on them to fix it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that RTOs are impossible with such pushback, but a lot comes down to how they’re communicated.
So if all the soft drinks are disappearing and everyone has a dental hygienist appointment on a Friday afternoon, it’s time to ask what workers want – and be ready to introduce a bit more flexibility to working schedules. Because that’s clearly what most employees genuinely want, rather than commutes fuelled by stolen snacks.
