Rethinking RTO: Boosting Employee Engagement for Business Success

UpTrajectory Review

Fast Company contributor Cathy Lewenberg takes on the return-to-office wave and argues that attendance mandates miss the point. She cites Gallup's finding that low engagement cost roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity last year, about 9% of global GDP, and that engagement in 2025 hit its lowest mark since 2020 after two years of decline. Lewenberg's counterintuitive claim: remote workers show higher engagement than hybrid or fully in-office staff, so forcing people back to their desks does not fix the problem. She points instead to limited in-office experiences, anxiety that AI will erode human connection, and weak wellness investment as the real culprits.

For a small-business operator, this argument lands close to home. You likely run a lean team where one disengaged hire drags down everyone, and you cannot absorb the 18% productivity gap or 43% turnover premium that Gallup attaches to engaged versus disengaged teams. Lewenberg's framing gives you cover to resist the copycat RTO mandates that big firms announce and the business press amplifies. If your five or fifteen people already deliver, the data says flexibility may be your retention edge, not your liability. Competing for talent against larger employers, you win by offering autonomy they refuse to grant.

The genuinely new element here is the direct rebuttal of the RTO-equals-engagement assumption, backed by Gallup's remote-worker data. We agree with Lewenberg's skepticism toward attendance metrics and her insistence that the office must earn the commute through better design and experiences. Her strongest point is behavioral: people respond to autonomy, not surveillance. Where we grow skeptical is the prescription. She gestures toward gathering spaces and recharge rooms but offers no cost framework, and a ten-person firm cannot fund the workplace redesign a Fortune 500 can. The advice risks becoming another wellness perk arms race that small operators lose.

The second-order effects cut unevenly. Large firms with capital budgets will convert lobbies into collaboration zones and market the makeover; small firms will either imitate badly or exit the office entirely, accelerating the split between experience-rich headquarters and distributed micro-teams. Landlords and coworking operators gain leverage as small businesses rent flexible space by the day rather than sign leases. Meanwhile, the AI-anxiety Lewenberg flags hits support and administrative roles first, which means your front-line staff may need explicit reassurance and retraining budgets while your developers barely notice. Engagement spending that ignores this split wastes money.

Watch whether Gallup's 2026 engagement numbers recover or keep sliding, and whether any major RTO-mandating firm publishes retention or output data that proves the policy worked. Most will stay silent, which itself tells you something. If you operate a small team, audit your own engagement drivers this quarter: ask each employee what would make the office worth a commute, then fund one concrete change rather than a broad perk rollout. Track voluntary turnover and output per person before and after. Lewenberg's core claim is testable at your scale, and you will know within two quarters whether autonomy or presence drives your results.

“Bringing employees back into the office does not automatically translate into greater engagement, especially if attendance is the primary measure of success.” — Fast Company

Takeaway: Stop counting desk hours; ask each employee what makes the office worth the trip, fund one concrete change, and track turnover and output for two quarters.