Here's a fun idea to toy with. Remove a person from a job, yet somehow manage to convince them that it was their decision to walk away. No severance. No negative publicity. No uncomfortable company-wide meetings where the CEO cites a "challenging environment" in a letter. And many companies are intentionally implementing it. ## The quiet part, said out loud
Typically, this lives on vibes and speculation. A megathread on a developer forum where everyone is swearing up and down their four-day mandate is a stealth layoff. Well, now we have numbers. And they're not good. A BambooHR survey released in June 2024 (with data from March 2024) showed that a quarter of VP and C-suite executives and 18% of HR pros confessed that they were actually hoping for some voluntary turnover as part of their return-to-office efforts. Cut someone's job, but make them think it was their idea to leave. 😬
In the same survey, 37% of managers, directors, and executives admitted their company resorted to actual layoffs in the past year because fewer people quit during their RTO push than they'd hoped.. Anita Grantham, Head of HR at BambooHR, called it "a concerning trend of potential manipulation within return-to-office policies." That's a very polite way to describe a trap. ## Everyone already knows
That's the funny thing about traps. They only work if you're not expecting them. According to a survey by Enhancv in March 2026, 72% of employees believe that their RTO mandate is intended to function as a layoff, encouraging them to resign so that they do not receive a severance package.
Seventy-two percent. That's not a fringe conspiracy. That's the default assumption. As Volen Vulkov, co-founder of Enhancv, so eloquently put it, "If 72% of your workforce perceives a policy as a trick to get them to quit, the 'culture' you try to build no longer exists."
Therefore, the idea of collaboration doesn't hold water. It's not convincing to anyone. You can't say you're recreating that spontaneous whiteboard wizardry when three-quarters of the team believes you're simply looking to replace them. ## It's a whole strategy now
RTO is just one flavor of this. The broader move has a name: quiet firing. According to a report on Resume Templates from May 2025, 53% of companies have already started doing this or will be doing it soon: Just keep making the job worse until people leave. Their main career strategist, Julia Toothacre, essentially admitted that: "Business-wise, terminating employment silently will likely appear to be a cost-effective method for reducing staff without exiting interviews, media backlash, or pay-out."
That's a summary of the entire thesis, essentially, Financial engineering in a cultural disguise. And it functions, mechanically. People have left. The spreadsheet gets what it wanted. No one signs a severance agreement. ## Why I won't run this play
I have a small startup. Each person who joins is way more important to me than someone joining a 50,000-person company. Therefore, the mathematical formula that would make RTO work as an attrition strategy in large numbers simply is not applicable for our case. But even if it did, here's what I keep coming back to:
→ You don't lose the people you wanted to lose. You lose the ones with options. → Your best engineers have the shortest job search. They leave first. → The folks who stay are the ones who can't leave, not the ones who love it. → And everyone left standing now knows exactly what you're capable of. The actual price we pay is the loss of trust, and you can't earn it back by offering people a free lunch. It is impossible to betray half of your team silently and then expect the remaining members to perform at their best. They witnessed the betrayal too and are simply hanging in there. ## The takeaway
Let's use the right term. If a strategy is in place to encourage people to resign in order to avoid paying their severance, that is not a "cultural decision". It is a layoff in disguise. It's not the cost of the office lease, but the lack of honesty that truly hurts. So here's my question: if your company announced a strict RTO tomorrow, would you read it as a genuine culture call or start updating your resume that night? Which response would bubble up for you first?
Top comments (0)