お帰りになりました or お帰りしました? One of Them Demotes Your Boss

Which pattern belongs to which person?

Japanese politeness is not one dial. It is three separate layers, and only two of them care about who is acting.

The 丁寧語 row is the one most learners already control, and it is why the confusion survives: です・ます is politeness with no direction, so learners assume お〜 is the same thing, only stronger. It isn't. お〜になる and お〜する point in opposite directions.

Why does お帰りしました lower the president?

Because the humble pattern does not mean "polite version of the verb". It means "the subject of this verb is the lower party."

That marking is structural, not decorative. When you attach お〜する to 帰る and then make 社長 the subject, the grammar has already answered the question who is beneath whom — and it has answered it the wrong way round. There is no tone of voice that fixes it, because nothing in the sentence is rude. It is precisely as polite as you intended; it is aimed at the wrong person.

This is why the mistake is so durable in the workplace. A learner who says 社長はお帰りしました gets no visible reaction — Japanese colleagues rarely correct it out loud — so the error is never extinguished. Compare it to a case-particle error, which produces confusion and gets repaired immediately.

Where does this actually go wrong?

On the phone and at the front desk, where you talk about a superior rather than to them. This is one of our N4 items:

The four options are お帰りします / お帰りになりました / 帰っています / お帰りください. Three of them fail in different ways, and the failures are worth naming:

Notice that お帰りください is not a milder version of the answer. Adding ください turns the whole thing into an instruction, so it is fine on a station announcement and impossible in a question about a third person. In our bank's distractor labels, お帰りします and お帰りください are both tagged as confusable-neighbor — options built from the same お〜 shape that route somewhere else entirely.

Which verbs can even take お〜する?

Here is a filter that removes most お〜する errors before they happen: the humble pattern needs the other person to be on the receiving end of your action. If nobody receives it, the pattern has nothing to be humble about.

Every お〜する / ご〜する item in our bank uses a verb with the listener as beneficiary:

Now apply the filter to 帰る. It is intransitive; going home does not land on anyone. So お帰りします is broken twice over — wrong direction and no recipient — which is why it is not a real expression in Japanese at all, only a trap option.

The ご〜 versions follow the identical logic; ご simply replaces お in front of most Sino-Japanese (kango) verb nouns: ご説明になる is respectful, ご説明する is humble.