It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to go find it. You need to do what's right for you just like the management is trying to do what's best for the business. It's not some butts in chairs power trip though, maybe that's been your experience with a bad manager, but (practically) nobody at the C level making these strategic decisions is concerned with that part. They just know/feel the business is more cohesive and healthier when people are together in an office. Sometime there needs to be creativity and collaboration, not just checking off a task list. If your job involves checking off task lists, it's likely you're in too tactical of a vantage point to have much of an opinion of the company's strategic interests. An in any case, there's a lot of other intangibles around being connected with your coworkers IRL. You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper. Employee's care more about the company when engaged. So on.
That said, I feel most management teams have settled on being hybrid, where working in office is fluid, or perhaps standardized on a few days a week. I think everyone sees value in that approach, there's usually a happy medium is my opinion. But fully remote doesn't work well for a lot of larger complex orgs.
>You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper.
I really cannot take a sentiment like this seriously after seeing the last 15 years of American work culture. And especially the last 3. We spent the better part of 40 years tearing down the concept of careers, trying to de-professionalize as much local labor as possible, and outsource whatever remains, and yet companies still want to pretend they care about "culture" and and "engagement"? They lay off millions of workers the past few years and yet "retention" is still a metric somehow?
This is the problem seeing employees on a spreadsheet. You don't see the generational damage this is inflicting and the upcoming reckoning when that generation can no longer be ignored politically.
I mean, it's just anecdote vs anecdote. I'm a serial first eng -> VP/Dir for the last ... almost 30 years; I'm well aware of how creative projects work remote, and that retention and engagement are important. I've seen repeatedly over the last ten years especially C levels that want people in offices for "vibes" with _no_ data to back that up... In some cases opposite data. All of that gets mixed with data from teams that I support and/or lead being productive and never having a single person leave for reasons other than total corp restructuring; mean while everyone has a good mix of flexibility to have a family life.
Office first by default is a scourge on this industry.
Anyway, need to go empty my mouth after throwing up from reading your reply.
As you spit your listerine, please also clean your glasses and read again because the discussion is being made at a macro level and not centered on any particular industry and it’s also concerning RTO; as in, the company once was office based and wishes to resume that now that the pandemic is in the rear view. This is not a vibe seeking CEO discussion, it’s about large companies that were office first and designed and staffed around that concept. Them feeling like remote is a bad fit is completely fair game and employees should never have had expectations that it would be remote forever.
The truth of that may be upsetting, management is aware.
That said, I feel most management teams have settled on being hybrid, where working in office is fluid, or perhaps standardized on a few days a week. I think everyone sees value in that approach, there's usually a happy medium is my opinion. But fully remote doesn't work well for a lot of larger complex orgs.