- As players from Elon Musk to Amazon tout return-to-office mandates, employees who return have complained of office desk shortages, adding insult to injury.
Following hot on the heels of Amazon’s seismic RTO, telecoms giant AT&T has ended working from home for good and is now demanding its staff return to the office five days a week beginning in January.
But will the company actually be able to house the sudden influx of staff? At Amazon, the tech conglomerate swiftly realized that it doesn’t have the space to follow through with its return-to-office order—and it isn’t the first firm to face a desk shortage.
What’s more, AT&T is going to have to pull off quite the squeeze come New Year: Its workforce of roughly 149,000 has a drastically smaller office to return to than before the pandemic after the company consolidated its footprint to a few key hubs.
The business previously circumvented this—after ordering 60,000 managers to report to one of just nine offices nationwide—by telling 9,000 workers to relocate or resign.
An AT&T spokesperson told Fortune that it’s “enhancing our facilities and workspaces” as it makes changes to its work patterns but that a sizable number of its employees had never stopped working "on location," including during the pandemic.
Employees returning to office face desk shortages
After working from home for nearly four years, employers are asking staff to commute to the office, to do the same very job under the watchful eyes of their bosses. Adding insult to injury, some are even being forced to work from the corridor floor due to desk shortages.
Earlier this week, Business Insider revealed that Amazon is now backtracking on its strict new RTO policy and asking some workers to hold fire until it finds the space to house them from Monday to Friday—just two months after telling them to leave if they don’t like the mandate.
The company's real estate team recently started notifying employees that some of its workspaces, including in Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, and New York, won’t be ready until as late as May, per BI. And it’s not the first time Amazon has rushed to roll out an RTO but not had the capacity to accommodate staff.
Then there’s Google, which has asked staff to desk-share with a buddy and alternate the days they come in to use the space.
“Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler,” an internal document reviewed by CNBC stated, pointing to “real estate efficiency.”
Of course, employees are welcome to go into the office on unassigned days, but they’ll be forced to use an “overflow drop-in space.”
Meanwhile, some government offices in the U.K. were so short on space that once all the desks were taken, professionals were forced to turn the corridors, canteens, and whatever space they could find into their workspace.
One department had just 4,200 desks for the 8,000 full-time staffers who were asked to spend 80% of their time in the office—leading to “chaotic” conditions. In the ultimate sign that the RTO had backfired, many staffers were sent back home.
Likewise in the U.S., Elon Musk may want federal workers back at their desks five days a week, but in reality there are not enough desks to go around.
