Last week I discussed the evolving state of Return-to-Office (RTO), noting that big companies like Starbucks are amping up their demands for employees to report to offices more often, if not full-time. Now there’s yet another twist, as the political website The Hill reports on something it calls, “The Great State Government Return-to-Office U-Turn.”
States that rushed to implement stringent RTO mandates earlier this year are already starting to bow to the realities of downsized office space and employee recalcitrance, and are open to increased remote work, according to The Hill. What’s interesting about this apparent trend is that The Hill claims RTO mandates are as much about leverage in salary negotiations as they are about high-flown rhetoric around state employees being needed in state facilities. In short, some state employee unions are trading off wage concessions in return for remote-work flexibility. At a time when state budgets are likely to come under increasing pressure, controlling salaries in this way could be a valuable tool for governments looking to make up for cuts to Medicaid and other programs.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen RTO not really be about people coming into the office. Announcements of stricter RTO policies are often greeted with accusations that the policy is really being used as a backdoor way to reduce workforce size without having to lay people off and pay them severance.
This could leave IT guessing as to whether an RTO announcement is rooted in genuine conviction about where work gets done, or is part of a corporate strategy on workforce size and compensation. In an ideal world, technology leaders would be able to get a clear sense of the enterprise’s actual plans for office utilization – but that’s probably an unrealistic hope.
Meanwhile, on a separate front in the new convergence of tech and HR, we have BNY Mellon bank saying it will give staff logins to AI agents. The website HR Grapevine reports that, “Similar to human workers, the AI-driven systems are assigned to specific teams, operate autonomously, and may soon gain access to tools such as email and Microsoft Teams for workplace communication.” The website explains that, “The move is part of a wider trend in financial services to embed artificial intelligence into core operations, with varying approaches to autonomy and system access.”
This kind of development is what’s driving the Enterprise Connect team to open up our Conference program, to try and address issues that didn’t exist as recently as the start of this year, for most enterprises. The HR Grapevine article uses a term I bet you’ll be hearing more of in the next 12 months: “AI staff.”
It’s hard to imagine pieces of software being called “staff,” but given how the AI hype began and has proceeded, it’s also kind of hard to imagine it not happening. It’s an issue you might find yourself confronting sooner than you’d like.
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