If the point was to make the government less efficient to justify political platforms, why have private companies been doing the same thing for the last 3 years when there's no political upside for them?
I'm not saying the RTO policy is good. I'm very skeptical of it myself. But this explanation doesn't seem to hold water - especially when better explanations are out there.
They could be using it to thin out their staff without layoffs. They could be propping up real estate values. They could be dealing with sunk costs on office space and looking to justify them. They could be accomidating poor managers who cannoy evaluate employee productivity without seeing butts in seats every day.
Not to mention some people really actually do work less efficiently from home. I can't say exactly what proportion or what the overall productivity impact is. It's probably very hard to measure. But it isn't hard to imagine leaders (in both the public and private sectors) genuinely believing the RTO movement will improve overall productivity.
It also isn't hard to imagine large organizations doing a poor job when implementing their RTO effort. I saw similar issues with the RTO effort in my private company. The same issues also happened with the WFH effort during the pandemic. Mismanagement is commonplace in large organizations.
They could just be doing it to be petty and cruel to "government workers" in general. There doesn't always have to be a genius 5D-chess play. It's very possible the administration simply believes the federal workforce is full of their political opponents and just wants to grief them. A major component of the campaign and their base of support is rooted in cruelty to out-groups, so they're technically delivering a campaign promise to their base by just making people miserable.
If the point was to make the government less efficient to justify political platforms, why have private companies been doing the same thing for the last 3 years when there's no political upside for them?
I'm not saying the RTO policy is good. I'm very skeptical of it myself. But this explanation doesn't seem to hold water - especially when better explanations are out there.
They could be using it to thin out their staff without layoffs. They could be propping up real estate values. They could be dealing with sunk costs on office space and looking to justify them. They could be accomidating poor managers who cannoy evaluate employee productivity without seeing butts in seats every day.
Not to mention some people really actually do work less efficiently from home. I can't say exactly what proportion or what the overall productivity impact is. It's probably very hard to measure. But it isn't hard to imagine leaders (in both the public and private sectors) genuinely believing the RTO movement will improve overall productivity.
It also isn't hard to imagine large organizations doing a poor job when implementing their RTO effort. I saw similar issues with the RTO effort in my private company. The same issues also happened with the WFH effort during the pandemic. Mismanagement is commonplace in large organizations.