Mandate THIS!

The office was full of distractions, and I found it difficult to focus. People were frequently pulling me into unnecessary meetings or taking calls around me. Also, I function best when I have a snack every two hours or so. At the office, I was too self-conscious to eat, so I spent hours trying to distract myself from my hunger instead of working.

Thanks to Reader J for drawing our attention this brilliant piece from the Walruss, a magazine I used to read in Canada. “One for the Escapological archives,” says J, and they’re not wrong.

Big Canadian organisations — including the government and the banks — are apparently enforcing something called RTO mandates, RTO meaning “return to office.”

They’re forcing people back into offices (and therefore back into cars and onto commuter trains) who have been working perfectly well at home since the pandemic (which, really, was over half a decade ago now — and weren’t we all supposed to embrace “the new normal?”).

I love that calling it an “RTO mandate” puts an official- and therefore important- and respectable-sounding sheen on what is little more than a mass yank of the leash. The writer of the piece, Kathy Chow, agrees:

I suspect the real motivation behind RTO mandates has nothing to do with productivity or company culture and everything to do with control. That is what the modern office was designed for, after all.

There’s more. Enjoy.

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