Fortune.com has a piece out about how much RTO costs employees. They found that employees are resentful over the RTO. They should be.
2020 was an eye opening year for a lot of people. We found out that our so called legal protections against government overreach had an "emergency" loophole that apparently allowed gave the state ownership over your body. 50% of left leaning citizens revealed themselves to be willing to jail people who asserted such things as "my body my choice". Some willing to advocate for firing squads to enforce vaccine injections.
But also, with the lockdowns many people actually noticed just how much they spend going TO and FROM work. They realized how much actual unpaid time went into goign to the office, And it wasn't small change.
Consider this. Say you have a 1hr commute by car. You don't wake up and jump in the car and head to work. No. You wake up and get dressed and then get in the car. So that hour commute is ACTUALLY 2 hours. If you eat in the morning, then there's time for that as well. And all of that is unpaid AND is NOT your leisure personal time it is time spent preparing to work which you cannot avoid. You don't get paid for that.
Then at the end of the day you commute BACK home. Often that drive is longer than the one coming in because EVERYBODY is leaving at the same time unlike the morning commute which you can decide to come in earlier or later than the main crowd. So there's another say 1.5 hours gone. Get home and change clothes and that's 2 hours. So just in preparation to go to work, go to work, leave work, change out of work clothes, you have nearly 4 hours of unpaid time. Fully one half of your "on the clock" time and if ADDED to "on the clock" time, is nearly 12 hours in "job related activities" in which you only get paid for 8.
Any company offering a 50% raise to RTO?
So employees having done this analysis rightfully are objecting to that.
In addition, now that employees are freed from the commute, they can actually get 8 hours of sleep without changing their bed time to 9PM. That has massive health benefits.
Those who have school age children are able to see them off or maybe even TAKE their children to school (a place that is quickly becoming a groomer infested nest of vipers) rather than do the latch-key thing. Children can come home from school to a parent rather than an empty house.
This is a great psychological benefit to children AND parents.
People, freed of time spend commuting can use that time to get healthy. Instead of commuting they can run, bike, walk, weight train or whatever else.
Healthier employees cost less.
Then there is food. I "brown bag". I have been for decades. There was a time I paid for lunch. Total money waste. Yeah, tasted good and I gained weight. A lot of weight but it was a financial disaster. Staying home makes less of a difference for me but for those buying expensive cafeteria food or from delis, the savings can be quite large.
Then there is the clothes situation. Rather than a wardrobe of dress clothes that often has to be dry cleaned, all you need is two shirts or blouses, a blazer and tie. Zoom calls only require "professionalism" from the chest up. The savings on clothes is also HUGE.
So overall, RTO demands are companies asking for employees to once again pay their employers in order to come to work. If these companies were serious, they would at a minimum compensate their employees for all the time required to RTO. Even then that doesn't compensate for the activities one can partake of when at home (or whatever location).