Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.
Some had “multiple jobs” and both or more employers were getting the short shrift.
Small orgs are like small towns, everyone knows who’s up to what. Large orgs are like cities…
My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.
You can thank capitalism for that.
The "cities" metaphor is actually pretty apt. In small towns everybody polices each other, and you don't behave badly because your life will become pretty difficult if you do. In a big city, you either have lots of rules in the form of municipal codes, or people start behaving badly along some dimension, eg. crime in SF or zoning in Houston.
In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.
We are opening a new larger space (in the next few months), and have over a thousand people here now.
This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.
A central government delegating most of the day to day management of citizen's environment to local, highly autonomous entities is a common pattern.
Central is certainly easier for the rulers though and they have much more power and resources.
> But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.
It isn't a contradiction but these two statements seem to at least be in a bit of tension, right?
This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.
First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.