The one advantage this company always had was flexibility. Even before COVID people weren’t chained to a desk five days a week. That trust made the job sustainable and made people willing to go the extra mile.
Now that flexibility is gone. And with it, the one thing that actually differentiated this place.
Instead of motivating people, a strict five-day RTO mandate has created the exact opposite effect. High performers stop going above and beyond, while mediocre performers can hide behind a badge swipe and eight hours of “presence.” When attendance becomes the metric, you get attendance.
At the same time, compensation here isn’t truly market based. Raises and bonuses are largely blanket treatments, so individual effort barely changes the outcome. When results aren’t meaningfully rewarded and flexibility is taken away, the incentive becomes obvious: do the minimum and check the box.
Meanwhile the industry has already moved on. WFH and hybrid are now the standard across tech, telecom, finance, and most corporate roles. Only a handful of companies are still trying to force strict five-day office mandates. Fighting that reality doesn’t make this place competitive. It just makes it an outlier.
Ignore the market and ignore your own employees long enough and the result is predictable: the best people leave, and the only ones left are the ones with fewer options.