16 Major Companies Experiencing RTO Pushback
Many RTO announcements are met with public employee backlash. And a few recent surveys show the same.
A Gartner survey of 2,080 knowledge worker employees from May through June 2023 found the following:
- Intent to stay among knowledge employees surveyed was 8% lower with strict RTO mandates
- Intent to stay among high-performing employees surveyed was 16% lower
- Intent to stay among millennial employees surveyed was 10% lower
- Intent to stay among female employees surveyed was 11%
A Resume Builder survey of over 1,000 full-time employees in September of 2024 found the following:
- 1 in 5 U.S. workers who have been called back to their desks are now outright ignoring their employer’s RTO policy
- If companies start cracking down on compliance, 20% of workers say they are very likely to leave, and an additional 33% are somewhat likely to follow suit
- Respondents identified several challenges with their current RTO policies:
- Commute time (45%)
- Lack of flexibility in work hours (34%)
- Commute cost (33%)
- Difficulty balancing personal responsibilities (29%)
- Office distractions (26%)
- Reduced productivity compared to remote work (24%)
If you are planning some form of RTO, these are the stories you’re up against.
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1) Amazon: Pushback comes three ways
- Most Recent RTO Date: 1/2/2025
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 5 days/week
“CNBC noted that some 500 staff working for Amazon’s cloud compute business Amazon Web Services wrote a letter to that division’s boss Matt Garman last week criticizing his support for the RTO rule, arguing instead that “Remote and flexible work is an opportunity for Amazon to take the lead, not a threat” (source).
“An employee survey from Blind found some 90% of the Seattle-based company’s workers oppose the new policy” (source).
“More than 30,000 Amazon employees have joined a ‘remote advocacy’ Slack channel” (source).
2) AT&T: 7,800 employees sign a petition
- Most Recent RTO Date: 1/2/2025
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 5 days/week
“Kieran Knutson is a Minneapolis-based call center leader who has worked for AT&T for nearly 20 years, and he started a Change.org petition to appeal the decision. The petition drew more attention than he expected and has drawn employees from across the country who share his desire to protect remote work. It has over 7,800 signatures at the time of writing” (source).
3) Boeing: Employee union plans to delay RTO two years
- Most Recent RTO Date: 1/1/2024
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 5 days/week
“There is no deadline for all the Boeing workers to get back to the office, but one group has been told they will be full-time in the office when they return to work after the holiday break. The union says that the move may impact future contract negotiations. ‘Our contract is in place until 2026, if members tell us this is something they want addressed in the new contract, we can certainly take that up at that time,’ Corliss explained” (source).
4) JPMorgan Chase: Employees call RTO “tone deaf”
- Most Recent RTO Date: 2/1/2022
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 5 days/week
“JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, an outspoken advocate of the return to office movement, is getting pushback from his staffers, who feel the firm’s newest mandate requiring senior staff to be in the office five days a week is ‘tone deaf’ and ‘divisive,’ according to a Friday Reuters report” (source).
5) Nebraska Association of Public Employees (NAPE): 8,000 employees appeal
- Most Recent RTO Date: July 15, 2024
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 5 days/week
“The Nebraska Association of Public Employees, which represents more than 8,000 state employees, announced Monday it had appealed the July 11 decision from the Nebraska Commission of Industrial Relations. At the time, the commission said the state had unilateral authority to set workplace locations and procedures” (source).
6) Apple: 100,000 employees launch a petition
- Most Recent RTO Date: 9/5/2022
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Apple Together, a global solidarity union of Apple workers, launched a petition to demand flexible work location arrangements. This uniform mandate from senior leadership does not consider the unique demands of each job role nor the diversity of individuals, the petition states. The petition makes two explicit demands:
- First, for Apple to allow each employee to work directly with their manager to put together the best flexible work arrangements.
- Second, to ensure that formulating these arrangements ‘should not require higher level approvals, complex procedures, or providing private information” (source).
7) Alphabet: Union seeks a voice in RTO decisions
- Most Recent RTO Date: 6/7/2023
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Google employees are pushing back against the tech giant’s mandate that staffers spend at least three days a week in the office. The Alphabet Workers Union says it has 1,400-plus members” (source).
8) Bank of America: The bank threatens disciplinary action after RTO backlash
- Most Recent RTO Date: 10/18/2022
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Bank of America Corp. has issued ‘letter of education’ messages that threaten disciplinary action against employees who choose to work from home, as the megabank puts some teeth into its return-to-office mandates” (source).
9) Dell: Employee NPS score drops 14 points
- Most Recent RTO Date: 4/5/2024
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Dell, for instance, announced a new policy in February requiring most workers to come into the office at least three days per week or else face ‘trade-offs’ in areas like promotions. Subsequently, the company’s employee net promoter score dropped from 62 to 48 percent, according to another BI report” (source).
10) Deutsche Bank: Internal messaging board is flooded with backlash
- Most Recent RTO Date: June 1, 2024
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Deutsche Bank is facing a wave of backlash from staff after introducing new return-to-office mandates, joining a host of companies that are walking back their flexible working policies. A significant number of staff based in Germany criticized the new policies in an internal messaging board, according to a memo sent on Thursday by CEO Christian Sewing” (source).
11) General Motors: Management apologizes after pushback
- Most Recent RTO Date: 1/8/2024
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“In September 2022, GM said in internal messages to employees that it would end its Work Appropriately philosophy, which allowed for flexibility on where employees did their jobs, and ask them to come to the office three days a week. But after much employee pushback, Barra sent out a note to the salaried workforce days later offering an apology of sorts. She said GM’s plan still would include a more regular, in-person presence, but it would not implement any return-to-the-office policy in 2022″ (source).
12) Orion: Management blocks internal email that circulated a petition
- Most Recent RTO Date: January 2, 2025
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Subsequently, an anonymous, encrypted email account sent an all-company email blast containing a link to a petition on workplace advocacy website Coworker.org. The petition, addressed to Orion chief executive Natalie Wolfsen, said: ‘Recent communication regarding the work-from-home status via a survey has left us feeling alienated and unheard, and we want to hear from the leadership regarding this.’ The petition garnered 303 signatures before Orion removed the email blast from employee inboxes and blocked access to Coworker.org on company computers” (source).
13) SAP: 5,000 employees signed a letter opposing RTO
- Most Recent RTO Date: April 1, 2024
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“More than 5,000 SAP employees have signed a letter posted internally — and viewed by Bloomberg — criticizing the company’s RTO policies and have threatened to quit as a result. ‘We feel betrayed by a company that until recently encouraged us to work from home, only to ask for a radical change in direction,’ the letter from SAP’s European Works Council said” (source).
14) Starbucks: Management threatens employees who push back
- Most Recent RTO Date: 1/31/2024
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Niccol’s own work arrangement, which allows him to live in California and travel 1,000 miles to Seattle on the company’s corporate jet, sparked backlash by some workers and outside critics. Starbucks has said that Niccol will spend most of his time in Seattle or visiting stores. Several staffers had said they didn’t care where the CEO was based, as long as he didn’t crack down on in-office requirements” (source).
15) Walmart: Company-wide Zoom displays dissatisfaction
- Most Recent RTO Date: 10/31/2024
- Workplace Policy: Office First
- Office Visit Expectations: 3 days/week
“Walmart announced in May that it would require hundreds of remote workers to work in person at its Bentonville, Arkansas corporate headquarters, and other hubs in Hoboken, NJ and Northern California. A new Bloomberg report shows that employees pushed back on the return-to-office (RTO) mandate in a companywide Zoom call, and some chose to quit” (source).
16) Ericsson: Some employees face six-hour commutes
- Most Recent RTO Date: August 31, 2024
- Workplace Policy: Hybrid
- Office Visit Expectations: 60% attendance
“As it looks now, many are in a bind according to Jessica Nygren (VP of the Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers at Ericsson). Some of the employees come from other locations where Ericsson has previously had operations that have downsized or disappeared. They have then been offered a position in Kista but have remained in Örebro or Gävle. Now they are suddenly required to commute five, six hours a day, three days a week” (source).
Fortune 500: Every Return To Office Policy
