When I took the role (I’m on the product side, my counterpart is the Engineering lead but we run it together) I made it clear that I’m only taking this role if they let me run the teams the way I want to run them, within reason.
My view on what you’ve described is that my directives are to improve sales, stability and the trajectory of the company.
It is not my job to worry about what other teams or tracks or departments think of how I run my teams. For the first few months, it was very rough because I did get a lot of that passive aggressive bullshit from people.
I told them the exact conversations I had with the respective leadership individual and encouraged them to go have a conversation if they were willing to put themselves in the same situation as me.
None of them did and over time I grew thicker skin, plus stopped caring about what they thought as it was working fine.
There’s about five more teams in the product/analytics/engineering realm that operate the same way I do now and it has been a culture change.
I’d imagine in the next 9-12 months we’ll revisit the policy company wide.
But I’ll say this, I’m not sure it was the right call from the overall morale of the company but it turned our team from the butt of jokes into the leading example so it was the right call for our team.
The last company I worked for was basically “remote only if there was no other way” but the office policy was “if you need to be out for family events, doctors appointments, kids things at school, etc it’s totally fine”
And it was great.
OTOH, I also worked for an investment bank and there it was made clear, in my first day, that different people work different schedules so don’t assume productivity is sitting in your chair 9-5. I think it all comes from communication and clear expectations.
It's great for them, but it kills morale in the rest of the company as people in my wife's department kill themselves to come in day after day (despite good/bad weather, missing personal commitments, etc), while they notice empty desks in the dept. down the hall. Makes for some miserable workers.