Does going to the office make us miserable, or is misery simply inherent in the American office?
It’s a capitalist “chicken or egg” question that, just half a decade ago, would’ve been difficult to treat as anything other than a thought experiment. For the last 80 or so years, hundreds of millions of Americans, at a largely uninterrupted clip, have found themselves reporting to some variation of a fluorescent-lit cubicle, day in and day out, spending the bulk of their lives in a place that we’ve never since lived without.
Then came the pandemic, creating the highly unlikely conditions that allowed workplace researchers to examine the difference between white-collar workers in the office, and white-collar workers out of the office. For a little more than a year, the Society for Human Research Management, the largest trade and research organization for HR professionals, has been surveying U.S. workers about conflict at their workplaces to develop a “civility index,” measuring the amount of interpersonal conflict that employees report at work.
Think of “incivility” as the fairly common, routine disagreements or conflicts we all experience most days: being talked over, having an idea dismissed, inadvertently touching on a sensitive subject. James Atkinson, a vice president in SHRM’s research division, told me it boils down to “that ability to communicate, and both step away from the conversation and feel like your voice was heard, your voice was not dismissed.”
The organization’s most recent civility index, released in March, found that workers at companies that brought their employees back to the office reported 62% more incivility in the workplace, versus those whose companies didn’t return to the office. In the five quarters that SHRM has been conducting the survey, the March reading is its second-highest, following its survey at the end of 2024, after the U.S. presidential election.
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On its face, it makes sense that office workers would report more day-to-day conflicts than remote workers. “I think one of the primary drivers is simply the fact that it's more face-to-face interactions,” Atkinson said. “And while this creates more opportunities to engage and collaborate, and get to know other people better, it also creates the opposite.”
The most commonly cited drivers of incivility in the workplace were politics, social opinions and differences in race or gender, Atkinson said. “And those are all things that are going to come out in the course of your conversations, right?” he said.
"One of the primary drivers is simply the fact that it's more face-to-face interactions"
Still, while looking over the report, I couldn’t help but think of the ways that most people working some sort of white-collar laptop job — graphic designers, lawyers, accountants, marketing managers, customer care agents, recruiters, copywriters, consultants and dozens more — have taken to talking about our jobs. Because nowadays, post-COVID, when I’m meeting somebody new and we’re talking about what we do for a living, the conventional reaction to learning somebody has one of these laptop jobs is to ask whether they’re remote, or at least hybrid, for Christ’s sake. Two-days in-office gets a high-five, while three solicits a knowing shrug. Four days a week in the office, though, and you’ll either be asked how the job hunt is going, or assumed to be paid handsomely for your sacrifice.
Do companies enacting RTO mandates simply run unhappier companies? It’s a sweeping theory, but not at all far-fetched. Consider alone that virtually every organization ending remote work is doing so against the known wishes of their workers, who have demonstrated in countless surveys and studies their strong preference for more flexible work arrangements.
The post-pandemic business landscape is full of public, drawn-out battles between a companies’ executives and its workers over the RTO mandate. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a dogmatic proponent of RTO, went on an eight-minute rant during a town hall meeting in February, rejecting a petition against the company’s in-office mandate that was signed by 950 JPMorgan Chase employees. “I don’t care how many people sign that f***ing petition,” Dimon said in leaked audio from the town hall. He’s since apologized, saying, “I do town halls all around the world, and as you know, I mope sometimes.”
A recruiter showed me how many JPMorgan Chase employees have their LinkedIn preferences set to “open to work.” Of the company’s 300,000 workers, 120,000 currently indicate they’re open to new opportunities.
Patrice Williams-Lindo, a workplace strategist based in Atlanta, said the companies most strictly enforcing return-to-office mandates often have “a legacy of top-down decision making.” Upper management at these companies tend to distrust their employees, she said, and hold
“outdated definitions of productivity” — an approach that, naturally, makes employees resentful and inhibits healthy communication. “In other words, the incivility didn’t start with RTO — it was just harder to see when people were apart,” she said.
"The incivility didn’t start with RTO — it was just harder to see when people were apart"
For Nadine, a people manager in New York City who requested anonymity to speak openly, her company’s return-to-office rollout in March felt like “a huge slap in the face.” Her employer, a live music and event production company based in New York, brought employees back to the office four days a week once pandemic restrictions were lifted. But since March, the company has required all employees to work in-office, five days a week. “Everyone was upset, especially in our industry,” she said. “Pretty much the whole office took it poorly.”
Nadine manages nearly a dozen direct reports from New York, most of whom live in different cities. The five-day mandate landed in employees’ inboxes in February, in an email from the company’s chairman, who included the usual reasons behind the new policy: better collaboration, synergies, innovation, etc. As a people manager, she also received a separate email with suggested talking points for the inevitable questions she’d be fielding from her direct reports, all of whom have used their one-on-ones to vent their frustrations with RTO, she said.
“It’s been difficult because I feel similarly,” she said. ”I'm like, ‘What am I supposed to say as a manager when I agree with everything that they're saying?’ It’s tough. It’s not reasonable.”
“Every year, our company makes us fill out this survey,” she continued, “and every single year, the results show that people want a better work-life balance and more work-from-home flexibility. For them to do the opposite of that, and slap us with a five-day, in-office schedule just feels disrespectful … especially in this industry, where so much work is done outside the office.”
Not everybody on the company's payroll is adhering to the new mandate, she said. “The heads of our company are rarely here in the office, and their corner offices sit dark a lot of the time.”
Nadine read aloud from the chairman’s email to all employees, beginning in the middle of a sentence: “… being together in the office also helps you and your colleagues grow your relationships and professional careers in-office. Presence fosters more effective collaboration, training, supervision, mentoring and innovation.”
The email continued: “We grow and learn new skills faster and better through everyday, in-person interactions with leaders, colleagues and mentors, as well as in-person training, development and networking events.”
“Bull****,” she said, after finishing the last line. “Morale sucks, and it's only going to get worse.”
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