The RTO Mandate
They came back to the office. They filled the seats, gamed the dashboards, and perfected the illusion. The RTO mandate worked. Work itself disappeared.
It started quietly. Not with an email, not with a speech, but with calendar invites. “Team days.” “Collaboration blocks.” A spreadsheet began circulating, listing who was expected in on which days. There was no policy document, no official memo — just the creeping certainty that absence was now suspicious.
At first, the tricks were small. People arrived, dropped their bags and water bottles at their desks, and disappeared. Utilization reports showed 100%. The office itself was half-empty.
Management responded by matching Outlook status to physical presence: “If you’re in-office, you should be green.” Almost instantly, scripts appeared that flicked everyone’s dot to Available every few minutes. From the dashboard, the floor glowed like a hive of industry. In reality, half the hive was at the café across the street.
Badges came next. Facilities began publishing weekly summaries of entrances and exits, ranking the “most engaged employees.” Within days, the system was gamed. People badged in and out dozens of times a day, generating graphs of frenzied activity. The quarterly champion recorded 1,437 badge events. He was applauded for his dedication. Nobody mentioned he hadn’t touched his laptop in months.
By the third month, no actual work was being done. The only labor was the performance of labor, carefully choreographed for metrics and optics. Entire departments existed solely to track activity, building elaborate reports to track compliance, which staff then gamed with clever workarounds.
The RTO mandate had become the company’s sole function. The business itself — whatever it once sold or serviced — faded from memory.
And yet, the system was stable. Executives pointed proudly to rising engagement scores. Politicians praised the firm as a model of post-pandemic resilience. Investors, seeing full offices in glossy photos, poured in capital. The stock soared.
Outside the building, the world decayed. Trains were late, food prices surged, hospitals crumbled. But inside, every desk was filled, every badge accounted for, every camera satisfied. The illusion was perfect.
This was, after all, society’s true business: not productivity, not progress, but the endless theater of compliance.
And so the mandate succeeded. Everyone had returned to the office.
Nobody ever returned to work.