For many months, public sector unions warned about the damaging consequences to federal employee retention and recruitment posed by the federal government's planned mandate to force staff to return to the office.

As a hint of things to come, we now have initial assessments of what has happened at a number of companies that were early movers in demanding that employees return to working in-person. It’s not a pretty picture.

A trio of compelling reports — the Greenhouse Candidate Experience Report, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) and Unispace's "Returning for Good" report — offer grim hints of what will happen when government employees are forced to return to office.

Unispace finds that nearly half (42 percent) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. In other words, they knew it would cause some attrition, but they weren’t ready for the serious problems that would result.

Perhaps they should have. According to the Greenhouse report, a staggering 76 percent of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work arrangements. Employees from historically underrepresented groups are 22 percent more likely to consider other options if flexibility goes out the window.

The SHED survey helps explain why. The displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one has the same effect on employee satisfaction as a pay cut of up to 3........

© The Hill