Companys keep having RTO policies. They keep escallating the pissy nastygrams & unspecific threats. But even when it's merely 2-3 days a week, people just don't show up.
We've had "quiet quitting" but this isn't quitting... it's a different resistance. And I think these RTO plans are going to keep crashing into oblivion. The tide has turned. This long-standing norm of being in-office all the time is dead, and no one has figured out a single useful carrot to dangle to get us back. Often the RTO is worse situations than when we left office.
This following rant is just me off-gassing & only semi-related. Our own company recently announced an upscaled RTO. As a city-dweller, it's a nearly 90m commute out to the suburbs (one way) via light-rail, after they closed our in-city office that was a 5m bike ride away. These fucking clowns don't give a rats ass & don't think for a second about the asymmetry of their ask. To them, it's like, oh, you're within 30 miles, this can't be a real burden on anyone. Because they're a bunch of out of touch suburban wankers who drive everywhere, with not the faintest fuck-all clue of how other folks live. To them, it's: 2 days, that's not bad.
But even 1 day is almost 2x the entire weekly commute I had, and by awful & expensive metro-rail versus a delightful on bicycle ride. To an awful business park, versus being inside a great city.
The people asking for RTO are useless. The asks are all hidden anonymous shitty figures. The workers, I hope, just don't do it. I've been doing 1 day a week, with the nod from my managers to just quietly subtract commute time from my work-day-hours. The clowns "in charge" realized no one had any respect for the RTO, & eventually realized tons of people just didn't show up. So now they're starting to tell the managers they have to keep attendance, that there's gonna be some real policing. But frankly it's the managers who skip the most. Tons of people have filed for exemptions for various reasons & fought to get exempted, but another 70% just don't show up reliably. And these companies are powerless to change that. Good luck threatening your actions, chums.
Even the highest tech company on the planet- perhaps especially the highest tech company on the planet- is going to have a hard as fuck time actually making the threat real, is going to keep looking like idiots. There's just no cause. There's no carrot, no sales-pitch why, no belief it's useful, and no threat imaginable that can actually scare compliance. This is a huge story, and I greatly look forward to the once-almighty power-structure being ongoingly roundly ignored. The old corporate hierarchy of control is dead, ring a ding a ding dong.