- The study reveals continuous resistance to RTO mandates
- Many workers say they would look for a new job, or simply resign, if they are forced to return full time
- Women more resistant than men, but BME workers also affected
A new study has revealed that attitudes towards a full -time return to the office (RTO) remain incredibly resistant, since workers seek more flexibility and productivity in their roles.
More than one million observations of the workforce survey (LFS) and about 50,000 responses from the work and attitudes survey (SWAA) United Kingdom since the beginning of 2022 and 2024 were analyzed by researchers at the King’s College London (KCL) and the King’s business school to see if the workers’ opinions on RTO mandates had changed.
As expected, the report found that many workers still opposed the policies, with less than half (42%) saying that they would agree to return to the office full time, and the general figures that show that “there is no clear tendency of a massive return to the office in the United Kingdom.”
RTO resistance
“Despite the growing public announcement of the CEOs and reports of the mandate of the return companies to the mass office, based on two large -scale representative surveys of the United Kingdom labor market, we do not see evidence of this,” said Professor of Authors Heejung Chung and investigated Shiya Yuan in his report.
“We do not see clear signs of workers who return to the office, nor do we see evidence of employers who restrict the possibilities of domestic work of workers in their policies. In fact, we see a growing number of workers who can work from home.”
In general, the figures showed that work rates from home (WFH) remained stable since 2022, with more than a quarter of all workers who say that the home is their main workplace, and approximately 40% of workers work remotely at least once a week, with more than 25% work three or more days from home.
The report seems to indicate that RTO’s mandates are a possible decisive factor for many workers, since half of the respondents said they would prefer to find a new work to return full time in their current employer, an increase of 40% in the previous survey.
Women were more likely to look for a new job (55%) or quit completely smoking (9%) than men (43%and 8%), with much more unlikely young mothers they meet.
However, it was discovered that black and minority ethnic workers fulfilled a little more with the return to the office, that the hypothetical study could be due to a possible “work insecurity and discrimination in the workplace.”
“For human resources leaders and policy formulators, the message is clear: well -designed hybrid work models offer significant benefits for both employers and employees who support equality, retention of talent, collaboration and commercial resistance,” the authors concluded.
“The rigid rto demands not only the risk of reverse these profits, but it can also create serious challenges of recruitment and retention in a labor market where flexibility has become a reference expectation.”
