The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters. This column is part of the weekly Reuters Sustainable Finance newsletter, which you can sign up for here https://www.reuters.com/newsletters/reuters-sustainable-finance/

By Ross Kerber

BOSTON, Jan 22 (Reuters) - While leaders from the White House to Wall Street order workers back into their offices, one Boston CEO uses carrots rather than sticks to lure his employees to work.

Trillium Asset Management CEO Matthew Patsky summarizes the strategy as "creating a fear of missing out" for employees who stay home. He wants colleagues to interact and to "leave people feeling like, oh, I really want to be in.”

The head of the $5.1 billion asset manager spoke as he gave me a tour of the firm's offices on the 31st floor of a brand-new skyscraper in downtown Boston, with stunning views over the Charles River. It was a chilly Thursday afternoon and around three-quarters of Trillium's 36 locally based employees had shown up, a typical midweek turnout though it still left the company's 20,000+ square feet of office space feeling airy.

Since moving into the space last April, Patsky said the firm has held frequent events like drinks, book signings and staff birthdays, plus lunches with representatives of partner organizations and a Tuesday investment-committee meeting. All prompt the typical Trillium employee to come in some 2.5 days a week even though the firm has no set requirement.

Patsky says he has no simple way to track employees' productivity, and that he has good workers who are fully remote.

"We all remember, those of us who have been in the business long enough, the concern that people will slack off if they're working from home. But that didn't prove to be true," he said.

Trillium may not be the best role model for every company, as a sustainability-focused firm in a wealthy city and a unit of Australia's Perpetual. PPT.AX

State Street Corp STT.N, which occupies 500,000 square feet of the same building at One Congress Street, has a four-days-in-the-office mandate.

But Patsky's approach ticks a lot of boxes about what employees want: 50% of workers would prefer some kind of hybrid work arrangement, said Stanford University Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom, who studies the topic. In a recent paper he found work-from-home policies improved employee retention without hurting productivity.

Survey data Bloom sent me shows work from home stabilizing around 25% of workers' days since 2023. Not everyone gets that choice: 62% of U.S. workers are fully on-site, including the front-line employees who are lower-paid. Meanwhile the 25% of workers with hybrid jobs tend to be professionals and managers who make more money.

BACK TO FIVE DAYS A WEEK

This month JPMorgan JPM.N told hybrid employees to come back to the office five days a week, as did Amazon.com AMZN.O in September, in both cases prompting employee complaints.

Then on Monday President Donald Trump told U.S. federal workers to return to the office five days a week, at the same time weakening job protections for civil servants. Unlike some statements from private sector companies, Trump's allies said the moves are "intended to help the president replace long-serving government workers with loyalists faithful only to his agenda," wrote my colleague Raphael Satter in his coverage.

Bloom, the economist, said the end of federal hybrid work policies may boost quit rates by a third. A challenge will be that those with the most in-demand skills will be first to leave, such as the information technology staff who run government websites.

Whatever those sites' problems now, "just wait until 2027 when half the IT staff have gone," Bloom said.

(Reporting by Ross Kerber in Boston; Editing by David Gregorio)

((ross.kerber@thomsonreuters.com; (617) 412 0093;))