When companies say back to the office or else, many skilled people pick or else.

I'm David Brancaccio. Many bosses want people coming back into the office, some of it for team

building, some of it to weed out slackers, but many remote employees have set up their lives

around working from home and others want to keep putting wasted commuting time to

productive use. Now new research shows not only are back to the office mandates unpopular with

employees, they can chase away the people with the most skills. Marketplace's Henry Epp reports.

Telling workers they need to come back into the office five days a week has a lot of downsides,

says Lujina Abdel Wehette.

She studied data on return to office policies for Ravallio Labs.

It negatively affects hiring. It negatively affects attention and negatively affects workforce growth.

Companies requiring in-person work grew their head counts about 1% over two years, she found,

while hybrid or remote companies grew by 1.6%.

Mark Ma at the University of Pittsburgh says that's in part because when they're ordered

back to the office, many employees look for other jobs.

However, not everyone has other opportunities, and it is those most skilled employees who have other opportunities.

Meaning mandates can cause firms to lose their best employees. They also lead to mistrust between employees and managers because Ma says there's often a disconnect between employees who feel productive working remotely and

managers who don't trust that they're getting work done.

So that creates a big cultural problem inside the firm.

The best solution, he thinks, is to let employees and their teams decide for themselves

how often they want to come into the office.

I'm Henry App for Marketplace.

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