What 2025 holds for RTOs and why Americans may be accepting lower salaries

Coming up on today's episode: We're diving into the latest RTO trends for 2025! We'll explore how major companies are taking wildly different approaches - from WPP's new four-day office mandate to firms like Spotify doubling down on flexibility. Plus, we'll discuss some fascinating findings about workers choosing flexibility over higher salaries, and tackle the tricky question of whether remote work might be holding back career progression. Stick around for a candid conversation about what all this means for HR practitioners navigating the future of work.

Connect with Jared
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredkleinert/


Connect with Stacey
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceynordwall/


Articles
How return-to-office mandates could change in 2025, according to top HR leaders from PwC, EY, and Canva
Why Americans Are Accepting Lower Salaries
Global ad giant WPP issues sweeping RTO mandate for its 114,000 staff, calling them back to office 4 days a week

Transcript

Stacey Nordwall 

Welcome to Toot or Boot, where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. We toot the news we like and we boot the news we don't like. I'm your host, Stacy Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us today we have Jared Kleiner. Welcome, Jared.

Jared Kleinert 

Hello

Stacey Nordwall 

Jared. For those who don't know about you, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jared Kleinert 

Sure. Today I am the founder and CEO of offsite. We plan team retreats and offsites just like the name suggests. Before offsite, I was an early employee at 15 five, which I feel like half of your audience will know 15Five. The other half will know Lattice, Culture Amp, some of the other sort of immediate competitors. But I was employee seven at 15 five back when I was a teenager. I had a phenomenal experience there and then took a seven year, speaker, author, consultant, turn to my career where I wrote a few books and did Ted and TEDx talks. A lot of corporate keynotes ran my own summits for entrepreneurs pre pandemic. All that led to starting offsite because I was hypothesizing that a lot of companies would go remote first or hybrid if that were true. They'd all plan team retreats and offsites to get everyone back together in person. And if that were true, I knew from experience that planning offsite sucked. There had to be a better way and let's make the company for that. And so offsite.com is the software products that make it easier to plan team retreats, and then we also do end-to-end offsite planning for hundreds of companies all around the world. And then I occasionally hop on podcasts like yours and toot or boot some of the news.

Stacey Nordwall 

Yeah. Well, and obviously, I mean we know that remote work RTOs, this is kind of a big and ongoing topic, so it's something we're going to jump into today because I'm sure that you have some very informed and strong opinions about some of the debates that are going on and whether or not they actually feel like debates to you. But we'll start with an article that comes to us from Fortune. It is called How Return to Office Mandates Could Change in 2025 according to top HR leaders from PWC, EY and Canva. The recap here, as I said, RTO continues to be a huge discussion. On one side, we've got companies like Amazon, Starbucks and WPP who we will get to later who are mandating RTOs. And on the other side we have companies like Spotify and Allstate doubling down and sticking to their remote and flexible working policies. It seemed like the general consensus here from these HR leaders was that hybrid working models would become more the norm and that companies would need to be more clear about what their policies are so that employees know that when they're choosing where to work. What was your overall thought on these different takes by these HR leaders?

Jared Kleinert

To your point, I'm surprised this is even a debate.

Stacey Nordwall 

Yeah,

Jared Kleinert 

I think we all experienced the worst version of remote work during the pandemic and yet still saw companies skyrocketing in terms of productivity, in terms of profitability, in terms of employee happiness relative to work. I mean there was certainly other things going on in the world at the time. Those things are still true and if not more true now because we are experiencing a more positive work from home work from anywhere situation where we can actually go outside and hang out with people and make more of a lifestyle around work. And so at the same time, we are in more of an employer's market right now and so I think that's part of what's being missed in the conversation is what does return office mandates look like when it's more of an employee driven economy and talent gets to decide the rules of engagement versus employers.

And so I think that the conversation's silly completely, but I mean if we're more practical about it, I see this as a slight reversion on an otherwise long-term trajectory that pushes more towards remote work and more towards flexible work in general. Are we going to be more in offices in 10 years or less in offices in 10 years? I'm going to bet on us being less in offices and having more remote work, more flexible work. Probably 50% or more of our economy is going to be driven by freelancers and fractional work and AI agents. We're going to zoom into the office or we're going to put on glasses and do an VR situation or augmented reality situation. I just think that's probably more the future than everyone being forced into an office four or five days a week.

Stacey Nordwall 

Yeah, I think I am not ready for VR being in the office. I'll say that. So of those predictions, that would be my least favored one.

Jared Kleinert 

You're booting that,

Stacey Nordwall 

But overall I think I agree. I think we're going to see a change in what the workforce looks like and how people are engaging with it in terms of flexible and fractional and all of these things. I think and reading this article generally it seemed like were saying yes, hybrid is the way to go, but underneath that, which I thought was odd and why there's a hint of a boot in this for me is that PWC and EY both as far as I recall and the latest that I've seen, they both really pushed RTO and even had some things where in different places they were tracking workers' badges when they badged into offices. And so it felt really weird to see them in the article say things like, oh yeah, hybrid is going to be the way it is when I know that they have these plans that are very contrary to that.

And when we're talking about is four days a week in an office, does that feel hybrid to me? That's not hybrid. I would not really characterize that. I mean at that point I feel like just go to a nine 80 work schedule or something like that and the workforce has every other Friday off instead of doing something like four days a week. And I think it gets to this, which we can talk about more too, is what they still seem to push this misconception that collaboration is really only possible in person or that it means four days a week in person as opposed to quarterly offsite or quarterly gatherings or figuring out ultimately how to work together in an asynchronous environment, which a lot of people are in anyways because they're distributed or figuring out ways to measure performance that isn't just buts in seats, right?

I can see you in the office and therefore you are working and performing. So I think that's kind of under that where I thought I can see that some of y'all are saying that you think that's the future, that's not the actions that I'm seeing though, and that's not what it seems like you believe. So I don't know if you got a little bit of that as well or what your thoughts are. I mean I'm sure you believe that collaboration is possible outside of just being in an office 80 to a hundred percent of the time.

Jared Kleinert 

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I would also call out in the article they were talking about how the government is with Elon Musk is helping, is being very explicit about pushing a return to office mandate as one way to reduce headcount. And so one, I just boot that concept, I probably toot the transparency of what they're doing or attempting to do and agree with your boots on how are we categorizing hybrid because if you describe hybrid as four days a week in office, is that really hybrid or is hybrid more a model where you have offices if people want access to them or need access to them for specific brainstorming sessions or to entertain clients but can otherwise work remotely? I would probably be more in that camp related to hybrid work than what is being described here as four days a week in office.

That just seems silly and it seems like we just have a lot of real estate that we invested in five, 10 years ago in terms of buying the land, refurbishing the offices. We got to use it because we can't sell it, subcontract it. So part of the longer term thinking for me too is what's going to happen when these leases come up in 3, 5, 10 years? No CFO is going to approve expanding headcount or office space, sorry. Most are going to probably reduce their footprint even if they're working in office because we're just going to try and have more efficient companies that have AI agents and have less staff to do more work. And so I just think there's other tailwinds that'll lead to being increasingly hybrid, remote. All these companies are kind of remote first anyways, or in other words, they're distributed, they have offices all over the world and so what are we talking about here?

I boot this whole concept, this whole debate I think is silly. I'm thrilled that it's still a debate though because it allows me to post on LinkedIn every day about the nonsensical nature of this and clip articles like this and then I get a lot of impressions and comments and ultimately drives a lot of traffic to offsite.com. So I boot or I'll toot the fact that it's still a debate for my own personal benefits and promoting the company, but I boot that it is a debate in terms of what it's doing to the workforce and the end user here.

Stacey Nordwall 

And I think you point out something, I've said it before as well, that it's interesting how many of these companies are holding on to return to office when their workforces are distributed and it is incredibly likely that people's teams are not all co-located with them, that they're working with people in other offices, other time zones, other countries, and therefore what does being in the office really get them if their teams are not co-located with them in the office? It does just seem like a very silly thing and like you said, then what's under it is what's under it about the real is what is under it about forcing these returns as a way to get people to leave what in some situations I think there is something like that happening underneath this desire to get people back into the office.

All right. Well on that note, let us move on to the article that we have from Newsweek. This article is called Why Americans Are Accepting Lower Salaries, and the recap for this one is that based on a report from Robert Half what they're highlighting is that work flexibility is essentially becoming part of compensation negotiation and that Americans are willing to accept lower salaries in order to have greater flexibility. They say that for employers, it's a balancing act trying to incentivize in-office work with some in-house perks and higher salaries or giving in to remote and hybrid work at a lower pay and that folks are willing to take a cut in salary or possibly other benefits to get for the hybrid or remote working. They also note that employers can reduce attrition and improve attraction by offering hybrid or remote work. So what did you think?

Jared Kleinert 

I very much toot that last part. That remote work allows you to retain top talent and if you're hiring the right talent, you will have a company that has overall greater engagement, alignment, retention, and theoretically you can access greater talent because you're not restricted to your geographic area. You can hire anywhere in the world. And so I very much toot the benefits as an employer. I would say this is true right now where as we're opening up positions at offsite, we're a very small sample size here, not hiring too often, but there is a much greater supply for people that want remote jobs or there's a greater demand for people that want remote jobs. Then there is supply of those jobs right now and so that does benefit employers and that does mean employers can offer a lower salary in order to get the same probably quality of hire.

I boot the notion that as an employer you should leverage this and almost undercut what you can pay. I think you have to balance hiring the best people and maybe leveraging offshoring and perhaps localize the salaries to some degree, but I would find a way to pay on the higher end if possible for talent because then you're getting the most talented people possible and you're paying them well and you're providing this amazing flexibility and lifestyle and so if you're running your company right then you are hopefully keeping much more talented people for much longer. You can ask more of them from a performance standpoint, but you're compensating them for that. And so that's how I prefer to operate, but I think this is definitely a real thing happening as more people want to work flexibly remotely and the fact that this is still a conversation again is mind blowing, but while it is there is a supply and demand imbalance and right now it's favoring employers. I don't know if that'll be true in 2, 3, 5 years. It might favor talent at some point, but today it favors employers.

Stacey Nordwall (

Yeah, I think you make a good point there. I was thinking for me, I tooted it. I think the article title's a little bit misleading. It seems like, oh, employees are just accepting lower salaries. It's part of the negotiation process essentially. It's part of employees negotiating what they want and what they value. I think that is good. I think that's a good signal if employees are doing that. It's a signal to show employers that is actually an attractive thing for people. They want that. To your point, the lower salary right now is probably because of this supply and demand in terms of there are far more people who want remote jobs than there are remote jobs in this moment, and so that is leading them to negotiate in a way of saying, okay, I'm going to look at what I value and what I value is having this flexibility.

I think that the title is a little bit misleading because it isn't just employees choosing to get paid less. It's really that people are taking a step back and deciding what they value, which I think is important obviously I think eventually as you're saying, as the market shifts, then maybe this changes maybe when there are more jobs, people aren't accepting lower salaries because the flexibility is just more of an option, it's more available and then we're looking at companies trying to essentially do things that are more competitive to get that talent and to attract the talent and retain the talent that they have.

Jared Kleinert

Yeah, I guess final point for me, I would toot the idea that your salary is not the only thing that's valuable. This article talks about how a lot of people are willing to take a lower salary for more professional development opportunities or for more vacation days or for company sponsored health insurance, retirement focused contributions or company-based contributions, equity at a company. I think there's so many different variables to consider in terms of total comp and then also looking at are you joining a startup that has tremendous upside and you can sort of create whatever title and career path you want. Are you working at a company that's stagnating, declining, perhaps? I think all these variables would come into play in that negotiation.

Stacey Nordwall 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's just to the point that flexibility is now part of the negotiation or has been, but is definitely now part of the negotiation as well. All right. Let's move on to our last article also from Fortune. This is Global Add Giant WPP issues, sweeping RTO mandate for its 100,000 staff calling them back to office four days a week. The recap here, up until recently, they had a hybrid work set up where employees could work as few as one day a week in the office, but starting April they will be required to work at least four days a week in the office. The reason being that the CEO believes that we do our best work when we are together in person. What are your thoughts?

Jared Kleinert 

Big boot on this one. Yeah, yeah. At risk of coming off as ageist, if you look at this article like the ceo, lots of gray hair, older man for sure, older white man if that matters, but I think there's a generational conversation to be had here too. Back to these headwinds tailwinds that we've been discussing. You got to ask yourself in 10 years when predominantly boomer executives are out of the workforce and retiring and more Gen X millennials are entering leadership positions and then you have Gen Z and Gen Alpha or whatever the next version of it is entering the workforce, are those executives as leaders and the talent that they serve, are those people going to want more remote work, more flexible work, or are they going to bet and want office first company culture? I just think it's going to be more remote, more flexible, more hybrid distributed. That's just my personal hunch. And so yeah, I boot this whole concept, especially if they are going from one day hybrid to four. I don't know, it seems a little weird for me, but they also are thinking about a hundred thousand plus people, whereas I think about a team of 20 at offsite, so that's different.

Stacey Nordwall

Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to blame it on his age. I think there are folks who are really just used to operating in a certain way and they think that's the best way and it's the easiest way for them to keep operating as opposed to rethinking how their workforce would work or rethinking what does performance, how are we going to manage performance, how are we going to figure this out if people aren't in the office because we already know how we do it. Not that they're mean, they're doing it well, but they know how they're used to doing it. And to take a hundred plus thousand staff and rethink what collaboration looks like and support that, you have to be really intentional about it. And when I read some of these things, what I think about is that that's a lot of work and I don't think they want to do it. Ultimately. They don't want to have to be intentional and think about those things.

Jared Kleinert 

Yeah, I think you have a much kinder interpretation than I do, and I was just adding some spice maybe get a nice sound bite to social media, but I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying. Maybe they actually want to do the work even, but it's just so hard when thinking about a hundred thousand plus people and a company culture that you've built over time. I'm also reading, they own multiple agencies, so they have multiple company cultures within this larger structure and perhaps they need to think a little bit more about what's best for me as CEO is going to be different than what's best for my leadership team beneath me, what's best for all a hundred thousand plus people at various levels of the company. Even a kind interpretation might be they want to be intentional, but now this is such a massive ship to steer that the safer bet is a version of ramping up their hybrid policy to being a little more in office. So

I mean, to their credit, it sounds like they had a pretty hybrid culture already, and so this seems different than going fully remote to hybrid or fully remote all the way to five days. It seems like they are changing some of the parameters around their hybrid structure, which may be annoying, but likely most people already live close to an office as opposed to multiple hours away, and so there might be less relocating that's required to comply with this. There might be some more time on the highway or in commutes, but there's already some workflows around that and they're not fundamentally redefining the employer employee relationship. They're sort of going a little more down the spectrum towards office first, but I don't see it as a full redefinition of the relationship.

Stacey Nordwall

Yeah, I think I'll give

Jared Kleinert 

Them credit on that.

Stacey Nordwall

Yeah, it was a boot for me. I think as you're saying it isn't, maybe it's not like a full harsh shift. It does feel like going from one day to four days is a massive change, and if people are caregivers any of these things, it's going to be really a really stark change for some folks. But one of the things I wanted to dig in on and get your thought on, because this is something I've seen surfaced and I think is also underlying this conversation, one of the, I'll read this quote, nothing, which is a London headquartered gadget maker told its staff in August that remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed. And so I've seen this in other places as well that ultimately they're saying remote work is what they say a possible career in Peter, so they're trying to make this case that partially bringing people back in the office. It's because we do our best work together, but it's also because you can't be a high ambition person and be a remote worker.

Jared Kleinert 

Yeah, I fundamentally disagree and so huge boot to use your terminology. I think it comes down to an individual level for things like ambition and make sure you hire each individual person to the best of your ability that will come in with ambition and want to drive forward the objectives and culture that you have. If you want to take it to the organizational level, then think about your mission, vision, values and the system of values that you have for finding and attracting talented people. And so are you setting really aggressive OKRs and are you tackling a very exciting mission in the world? Do you have values around certain things that you would describe as ambitious? For us, we have a value around entrepreneurship, and so I expect everyone that works at offsite to take extreme ownership on their role and to think very entrepreneurially about solving problems where they are being resourceful, they're working quickly, they have a growth mindset.

These are things we screen for in the hiring process. And so I also think we are trying to be the category defining company in our space. It's relatively competitive right now, and so I think there's a short window of time to accomplish that goal. There's incentives in place around equity and certainly everyone's pay that if we can move fast enough towards being that category defining company, everyone benefits financially, but also they can use that calling card as being an early employee to offsite for the rest of their career and wherever they want to go. And so I think at any, at an individual level, just are you doing your best to hire the most ambitious people possible at a cultural level? Are you setting the mission, vision, values to attract the most ambitious people possible and actually repel people that would be using mouse jiggers or taking multiple full-time jobs? Those are the things that I would be thinking about versus blanketing millions if not billions of people into buckets of people that want to work in offices versus people that want to work remotely. I just don't like categorizing hundreds of millions if not billions of people in any sort of bucket, even generationally or any other way you could categorize people. I prefer looking at it at an organizational level and at an individual level when possible.

Stacey Nordwall

Yeah, I mean for me, I think I am an ambitious person and I'm a remote worker, but I don't want to make it, not to make it about myself, but I think it is just remote work. What we've seen, especially over the pandemic, that remote work opens up opportunities for work for a number of folks who may experience some kind of barriers or harassment or discrimination or any of these kinds of things if they were to go into an office and it opens up a lot of opportunity for them, it opens up opportunity for caregivers, it opens up so much opportunity and to just automatically say, oh, well, remote workers aren't really ambitious. I think that's painting a very wide, as your point categorization of folks that I wouldn't see that to be true or even know how you would make that judgment. But the thing is, which I think they don't really talk about, we do have, if you have this workforce where some people are remote and some people are in office and you are not working to make sure that those remote people are top of mind, we do see that in office people have more visibility, they'll get more projects, they'll get more promotions.

That is a real thing that happens. And I don't think that is because the remote workers aren't ambitious. I think it's because there is some kind of performance process that's broken where they're not really looking at those total team. So for me, it's more, again, kind of goes back to that intentionality of do you want to intentionally build so that you are making sure that people who aren't in the office if you are having hybrid, are still getting the same opportunities, are still getting the same promotions at the same rates, things like that. Because if you're not doing that, then it's easy to jump to a lot of these conclusions that, oh, they're not ambitious, or, oh, we can't do our best work when it's really just some of these processes are broken or they don't want to intentionally build them.

Jared Kleinert 

Yeah, I agree. As a CEO, I personally feel a sense of extreme ownership in anything that happens at my company. And so if someone isn't performing well, I likely messed up in hiring, in onboarding, in creating an equitable culture for people regardless of where they're working from in setting the strategy, so on and so forth. And so I think as an HR leader, you're probably best served having that extreme ownership mindset as well. And if you end up having someone who doesn't perform, then that is going to happen, but on average, you're going to be better for it if you're being intentional. To your point about creating parameters in an environment for success regardless of how you want to define the relationship between your company and your employees.

Stacey Nordwall

All right. Well, thank you so much for joining. Jared. If people want to connect with you, follow you, reach out to you, how can they do that, and is there anything you want to promote?

Jared Kleinert

Sure. Email me jared@offsite.com For anything, you can go to offsite.com and make a free account with us. If you are planning an offsite or team retreat and you want to search through our Airbnb style marketplace, we partner with thousands of hotels globally and can save you up to 50% on meeting space, room blocks, food and beverage, things like that. We also do an end-to-end offsite planning service that companies like Remote and Buffer, Reforge 15, five. Hi Bob, they've all used and so go to offsite.com, make an account. We'll reach out to you on the service route or email me if you mentioned Toot or Boot, we can give you a discount just so I know that Stacy sent you. And yeah, thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for listening. If you're on the other end of this and I'll boot it back to you for the final word.

Stacey Nordwall 

Alright, thank you again so much for joining and you can also follow Jared on LinkedIn. We'll put all of his info into our show notes.