“This is one of the ones that is very public about their return-to-office policy, and they’re relaxing it on ‘certain teams’ for hard-to-fill roles,” said Dolan.

The holding company wants new hires available on select dates, but not every day.

“Reading between the lines, it’s like somebody’s … covering their ass a little bit,” Dolan said. Holding company agencies want to comply with RTO mandates as minimally as possible, Dolan said, as human resources teams struggle to fill their hiring mandates.

RTO policies drive churn

As these staffing challenges mount, a growing number of frustrated employees are looking for new jobs.

A little more than half—51%—of survey respondents said they are planning to look for new roles within the next year. That’s compared to 36% for employees across industries, according to a recent Qualtrics report.

This might be because employees at offices with RTO mandates are experiencing two times the burnout of remote workers, and 46% of ad industry employees are already at risk of burnout.

“Somebody at one of these agencies was like, ‘I’m just not at a point in my life where commuting an hour and a half each way is attractive anymore,’” Dolan said.

Who benefits?

On the other hand, return to in-person work comes with some benefits, the survey data revealed.

Employees who are back in the office are 32% more likely to report being fairly compensated than peers in remote roles and 50% more likely to see advancement potential in their roles.

But agencies’ hiring challenges suggest that these positives aren’t impactful enough to counteract RTO’s pitfalls. “Burnout is pushing workers away faster than incentive structures can keep them in place,” the WorkReduce report states.

Employee disillusionment leaves an opening for more flexible agencies to lure top talent away from their uncompromising competitors. In fact, three large independent agencies currently working with WorkReduce are taking a different tact than the holding companies, Dolan said. One WorkReduce client told him it was embracing fully remote, global hiring for the long term.

“I heard one of them say, ‘We see this as an opening for us to go get more business from the holding companies because they want to do all this legacy [hiring] stuff. We’re going to embrace [remote work],’” Dolan told Adweek.

Some are implementing RTO policies but allowing certain flex roles to be remote.

“There are cracks showing in this RTO strategy. It stands to reason, right? People left New York … a lot of people left New York [during the pandemic],” Dolan said.