- Return-to-office mandates and cost-cutting could signal a shift in some bosses’ empathy for workers.
- The apparent change follows a pandemic-era focus on flexibility and worker well-being.
- CEOs are facing pressure from AI risks and some execs are worried about keeping up.
Like social distancing and elbow bumps, another pandemic-era norm has faded: bosses who seem to care about your feelings.
Return-to-office mandates, continual cost cutting, and high-profile rollbacks of diversity, equity, and inclusion work signal that, in many cases, the manager is back in charge.
Five years ago, the emergence of the pandemic and the overnight surge in remote work, along with the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s death, pushed many bosses to talk to their teams about far more than their jobs.
For some leaders, checking in on how their people are doing has become old, Maria Ross, an empathy researcher and the author of the book “The Empathy Dilemma,” told Business Insider.
“We have this percentage of bosses that are sort of like, ‘Oh, the pandemic is over. You had your fun being treated like humans. Now it’s time to get back to work,'” she said.
Powerhouse corporations from Amazon to JPMorgan have called workers back to the office, sometimes full-time. Amazon has said the move was about strengthening the company’s culture, while JPMorgan has said it’s the best way to run the company.
Microsoft is planning to cut jobs and is stepping up scrutiny of underperforming employees. Meta has announced plans to dismiss an additional layer of what it deems lower-performing workers. Meta is also among companies that said they would cut back on some DEI work.
Microsoft previously told BI its focus is on “high performance talent,” while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the company’s workers the move was designed to “raise the bar on performance management.”
Meanwhile, some employers are engaging in so-called “stealth firing.”
It’s not just in the corporate world. Last week, President Donald Trump ordered an end to federal DEI programs. He also said many federal workers would need to be back in the office five days a week — upending years of WFH arrangements for the roughly half of employees who could work remotely at least part of the time.
“This is an absolutely terrible idea,” one federal contractor in Washington, DC, told BI, who asked not to be named so she could speak freely without fear of repercussions. BI has confirmed her identity.
The autonomy she’s had meant she was willing to give more in exchange for the privilege of working from home some of the time. Rather than closing her laptop “at 5:01 p.m.,” if her boss asked her to take an after-hours meeting, she would agree.
Now, she said, she’s considering looking for a job that allows for a more flexible setup, at least on some days, even if it meant earning less.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly previously told BI that Trump signed the RTO order to make the federal government more efficient.
AI is weighing on business models
While many bosses would surely argue that RTO mandates and tougher performance evaluations are just part of having — and keeping — a job, some concede that their company cultures aren’t what they would like.
In 2024, about half of CEOs said in a survey from Businessolver, which tracks empathy in the workplace, that their companies’ workplace culture was toxic. Thirty-seven percent of chiefs also said empathy didn’t “have a place in the workplace,” more than the 30% of HR execs and a quarter of employees who agreed empathy didn’t belong on the job.
“Empathy is lacking in the CEO office,” Dan Kaplan, senior client partner at the recruiting firm Korn Ferry, told BI. He said some CEOs are “fed up” with quality-of-life discussions. Some bosses believe they made allowances for things like remote work during the pandemic that weren’t meant to be permanent, Kaplan said.
The draining of some CEOs’ batteries comes at a precarious time.
The rise of artificial intelligence — and the attendant risks to business models — is making some execs and rank-and-file workers feel FOBO: fear of becoming obsolete.
That’s perhaps one reason some leaders, juggling worries about innovation and market competition, want people back in the office. Those concerns come even as US workers’ productivity is up, thanks partly to AI efficiencies.
Siri Chilazi, a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and coauthor of the book “Make Work Fair,” told BI that productivity is “incredibly difficult” to determine for desk workers and that most organizations that say working from home hurts output have never measured it.
“A lot of times, this is really about control and senior leaders just feeling more comfortable when they can see butts in seats and faces in front of computers, regardless of what’s actually being done on those computers,” she said.
‘This is a power play’
Yet, Anders Indset, a tech investor, philosopher, and author of the book “The Viking Code,” told BI that part of what can get missed when the RTO conversation focuses on productivity is what he sees as the intangible benefits of togetherness.
Being in an office, bumping into a colleague, and having discussions that aren’t laid out in an agenda — and even disagreeing — can create what he sees as a healthful level of friction.
“Often something magical happens. Either you come to an agreement, or you start to spark a new project, or through a symbiosis, you tap into the unknown and come up with some new idea,” he said.
While that appears to be what some bosses want, not all of them are eager to risk the ire of workers by disrupting work routines established, in some cases, over several years. The data platform Crunchbase is a remote-first company with about 170 workers across 20 states.
Kelly Mendez-Scheib, the company’s chief people officer, told BI that employees will remember how they’re treated.
She predicts that while bosses have more power now, in a sometimes tough job market for desk workers, some CEOs will be forced to soften their stance on edicts like RTO if the market heats up.
“This is a power play, in my opinion, and it always has been,” Mendez-Scheib said, referring to RTO orders.
