Veteran office market broker Ken Ashley has created an acronym he believes describes why workers should come back to the office.

Ashley’s brainstorm is similar to FOMO — Fear of Missing Out — but with a twist. His concept is called "FOMAP: Fear of Missing a Promotion." And Ashley thinks FOMAP is the harbinger of an emerging trend.

For young professionals — millennials, Gen Z and what have you — who consider themselves upwardly mobile, FOMAP should become an essential part of how they think about their careers, Ashley told CoStar News.

“It’s hard to show hustle in a Zoom call,” said Ashley, chairman of the tenant advisory group at global brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. Ashley, who said FOMAP is his original idea, is based in Cushman's Atlanta office.

Ashley has a track record of picking up on trends in their early stages. He realized in early 2009 that social media channels could help him build his commercial real estate business and quickly established himself as a leading voice on real estate on Twitter. He went on to found the Commercial Real Estate Influencers, or CREi, lists that rank the industry's top professionals on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Ashley's group also holds an annual social media summit.

He formed his FOMAP hypothesis watching clients and other companies struggle to entice employees back after working from home to slow the spread of COVID-19. The post-Labor Day surge of returning workers that many predicted failed to fully materialize even after employers such as Apple, Walt Disney and Goldman Sachs urged staff to come back. While office use slightly ticked up after Labor Day, according to tracking by security data firm Kastle Systems, few U.S. cities reached even 50% of pre-pandemic office attendance.

Investors and landlords face potentially big losses if offices remain half-empty and tenants start reducing their leased space as a result. A study released this summer by Columbia University and New York University estimated the value of the U.S. office market could drop by $500 billion by 2029 if hybrid work schedules take hold.

It’s probably legal in most states for employers to require workers come into the office, said Mac Irvin, an Atlanta labor lawyer who advises management. But he adds that it has a downside as a human resources strategy.

“Employers have a tremendous amount of power legally,” Irvin told CoStar News. “But, practically speaking, you’re going to drive people to leave for another job where they can work remotely” if you mandate employees come into the office several days a week, he said.

As an office tenant representative, Ashley has a vested interest in getting workers back to their desks, and that's when he began to think about what might lure workers.

That’s where FOMAP comes into play, Ashley said. It’s all about workers finding their own self-motivation. The possibility of a colleague getting a promotion and raise ought to be enough to make white-collar professionals think twice about demanding a full-time work-from-home schedule, Ashley said.

“If you are hungry to advance your career, FOMAP is a real thing,” he said. “People want to reinvest in their own careers.”

Ashley was exposed to commercial real estate at an early age because his late father ran a landscape architecture firm involved in several high-profile projects. And being present at the office has helped him advance professionally, he said.

"Earlier in my career, being in the office gave me much better access to senior brokers and leadership," he said. "I loved bumping into them and occasionally they would let me sit in their office just to listen to them talk on the phone. I learned how to be a broker by watching them talk, seeing their body language and learning how they thought/solved problems. The lessons are priceless and very hard to replicate in any other way."

While Ashley acknowledged he hasn't run across a young professional who believes a recent promotion resulted from frequently coming into the office, the connection between promotions and in-office work seems to be on the minds of workers and employers. A recent survey of more than 180,000 office workers conducted by Cushman & Wakefield revealed being at the office is growing in importance, said Bryan Berthold, the firm's global lead for workplace experience.

The number of respondents who cited “visibility to leadership” as a reason for coming into the office rose to 17% in this year’s survey from 11% in the 2021 survey, said Berthold: “As more people come back to the office, those who aren’t coming in are starting to feel like lost sheep.”

Employers should strongly recommend that middle managers and other supervisors set a good example, Ashley said. After all, if your supervisor is always working from home, why should you come into the office? That applies whether an employee’s boss works in the same office building, or in an office three time zones away, he added.

“The boss needs to demonstrate their commitment to the organization,” Ashley said. “Workers will come in when their bosses come in, and when they know they need to impress their boss in person."