We’ve gone from “oh it’s our culture, we can’t wait to get everyone back in the office” to realizing we had hired almost half of the current employees in the company since the pandemic started so we moved on to consolidating office leases.
There is no going back to the “old ways” because we had simply grown too much for anyone but the tenured folks to remember. And we can grow faster because we’re primarily remote — we plan to hire about 2,000 people next year, 50% more than we had planned pre-pandemic (which should be a huge red flag for anyone looking to force employees back — they’re not bluffing about remote jobs being plentiful and we have lower overhead so we pay more.)
All of our work is collaborative. It’s actually far easier to be collaborative at scale if everyone is virtual; just the only baseline anyone had was when the bosses and half the workers were in the same room. Sure, the bosses felt good, but half your team was underutilized. The collaboration angle is absolute BS.