A new study conducted jointly by the University of Pittsburgh, Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, has concluded that Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates may hurt companies more than they help. According to the study Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain (provided by ArsTechnica), RTO mandates are causing companies to lose their best and brightest employees.
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The study, first reported by HR Dive, analyzed employment data from 54 companies on the S&P 500. Authors of the study collected data from LinkedIn, which was then compared against RTO announcements made by companies.
“To collect employee turnover data, we follow prior literature … and obtain the employment history information of over 3 million employees of the 54 RTO firms from Revelio Labs, a leading data provider that extracts information from employee LinkedIn profiles,” states the study authors. “We manually identify employees who left a firm during each period, then calculate the firm’s turnover rate by dividing the number of departing employees by the total employee headcount at the beginning of the period. We also obtain information about employees’ gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees’ skill level.”
The research team concluded that RTO mandates issued by these S&P 500 companies resulted in “abnormally high” turnover rates, as well as job vacancies being left unfilled for longer periods of time.
“These results are consistent with firms losing their best talent and female employees and facing greater difficulties with talent attraction after RTO mandates,” the study authors wrote. “Our study highlights brain drain as a significant cost of RTO mandates, even for the largest firms in the world.”
