In a lot of ways RTO has put working conditions in a worse spot than they were pre-pandemic. In the Before Times occasional remoting was informal and casual - if you had a doctor's appointment at an odd time, you'd remote for the day, with no formal approval nor teeth-gnashing.

Now even small everyday things like this are fraught. There are often formal approval chains now for what used to be entirely between you and your boss. Even where there aren't formal approval chains your boss now knows that these arrangement count against the team in some opaque metrics even they don't have access to.

Likewise, hiring remote candidates has become a minefield - pre-pandemic it was often entirely discretionary on the part of the hiring manager. Sure, the default was in-office, but making exceptions to it was entirely between the people who needed to work with the candidate and whether they thought they can make the arrangement work.

Now it has to be run up the flagpole - in some places all the way up the flagpole to the very top of the company. And at every rung along that ladder everyone knows - again - that allowing the exception will count against them in opaque and faceless metrics that are being scrutinized.

A top performer has to move out of town because of family reasons? In the old days you talk to your manager, maybe your skip, they'd tell HR it's fine, and... it just goes. Now? 95% chance the person has to leave the company, because someone in the newly-installed approval chain is going to nix it because - again - it counts against them personally where it didn't before.

Sigh. In so many ways we've regressed on this so much. The level of flexibility and discretion teams have on work locations has narrowed so dramatically, in exchange for yet another spreadsheet-driven bureaucracy.