Vast Majority of CEOs Ready to Make Remote Workers' Lives As Miserable As Possible

It's back to the office — or else.

Giving an Edge

The battle over remote work continues — and it looks like chief executives are overwhelmingly willing to take extreme measures to get folks back to the office.

A recent report from the global research and accounting firm KPMG shows that 89 percent of corporate CEOs at US companies are willing to dangle incentives like "favorable assignments, raises, and promotions" for employees who head back to the office full-time.

As Inc and Axios point out, that overwhelming figure suggests that CEOs may also be willing to withhold those same benefits from employees who choose to stay home. In other words, folks who are willing or able to get back into the office will likely have a serious advantage over those who don't want to be back in the office — or, perhaps more importantly, can't due to location, health, or family reasons.

It's a staggering figure, and one that comes at a tumultuous moment in the ongoing battle between remote or hybrid workforces and C-suite executives insisting that it's time for employees to get back to the office full-time — despite overwhelming evidence that remote work doesn't affect productivity.

RTO Cullings

The KPMG report also found that 79 percent of CEOs expect that within three years, corporate roles ceded to remote setups during the pandemic will once again be in the office full-time. Per the report, just a few short months ago, only 34 percent of CEOs predicted a mass return-to-office shift.

On that note, the report's findings come after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced last month that employees must return to the office for all five days a week, or otherwise risk being sacked. And while Jassy's decision might have some chief executives feeling inspired, it's worth noting that the decision was met with outrage from much of Amazon's workforce.

Many of them have since looked for work elsewhere.

"At first, I didn't quite believe it," one such Amazon employee, a mother who says she was hired with the understanding that there would be no full-time return-to-office mandate, recently told Fortune. "I've been updating my resume and portfolio, and rage applying to new jobs on LinkedIn."

Some CEOs have admitted to using return-to-office mandates as a guise for layoffs, expecting the decision to lead to some degree of a voluntary exodus.

Whether the executives' gambit to attract workers to come back to the office will pay off in the long run remains to be seen. If there's one certainty, it's that a mandate likely won't go over easy.

More on the future of work: CEO Alarmed to Discover That Laying Off 1,500 Workers Had Consequences