- Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Manchester United co-owner, is banning remote work for the club's staff.
- The policy shift was prompted after email traffic declined at one of his companies on work-from-home Fridays.
- His hard-line RTO approach falls in line with many big companies like Apple, Dell, and Meta.
The billionaire co-owner of Manchester United, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has told staff that he's banning work from home after key metrics were missed at one of his companies.
In an all-hands video call last week, Ratcliffe told staff that they would need to start coming into the office or "seek alternative employment," The Guardian reported.
Ratcliffe, the 103rd richest person on earth, bought a 27.7% stake in the soccer club in February, and his company, Ineos, took over the management of football operations. The billionaire is coming in strong by shaking off the company's post-COVID flexible work policy to boost productivity.
The policy shift was largely spurred by a dip in email traffic, per The Guardian.
Ratcliffe told Manchester United employees that traffic dropped 20% after one of his companies trialed work-from-home Fridays.
Staff are also under fire after Ratcliffe called out the untidiness of the club's premises last week. The billionaire told staff that the state of the club's IT department was a "disgrace," and other areas of the training ground weren't much better, The Athletic reported.
However, the strict policy change has some challenges. The company premises in Manchester and London don't actually have enough space to accommodate all staff coming into the office full time, per The Athletic.
Plenty of other businesses have taken the same hard-line approach to bringing employees back to the office. Dell delivered a similar ultimatum to its employees earlier this year: return to the office, or you won't be promoted. Other companies enforcing strict return-to-office mandates include Apple, Meta, and Google.
However, not everyone agrees that RTO mandates are the best way to boost productivity. Globant, a software company with 30,000 employees, is allowing all its employees to stay fully remote.
Some research has also called the effectiveness of RTO mandates into question. A recent study on S&P 500 firms by researchers at the Katz Graduate School of Business found that companies with strict RTO mandates weren't more profitable, and workers weren't necessarily more productive.