The other problem is that people advocating WFH over RTO tend to focus on the individual benefit to them rather than the holistic benefit to the organization.
And frankly, there's been way too much prioritization of "benefit to the organization" across all sectors these past few decades, very much at the expense of the individuals who do the actual work.
The really dumb thing is there's also a lot of evidence that doing things that make individuals happier, healthier, and more comfortable is a net benefit to the organization. This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc).
That may be a logical conclusion given the perspective of a certain set of knowledge workers but how about the employees who are pissed that their roles don’t get that WFH option? Does their unhappiness get a voice with the organization? As an organization how do you reconcile that disparity? Just belaying their fairness concerns with a “learn to code” kind of answer seems a bit more evil than just resetting knowledge workers back to 2019 work environments in my opinion.
So it’s not always a decision to actively hurt, it’s possible that the decision is one of a more holistic fairness for the organization’s employees…which benefits everyone to a degree including the organization.
The idea that no one should be allowed to work from home because some people can't has nothing to do with "fairness". It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.
I am genuinely sympathetic to people who work jobs that cannot be made remote, but want to work from home. I hope that they will be able to find a way to achieve that desire. But no one gains anything when they force other people to stop working from home just to prevent a "disparity" like that.
There have always been, and will always be, differences in the conditions that different jobs require. As some others have commented, some people have to work shifts; some people have to work outside in bad weather—yet we don't see a clamoring to make everyone work shifts, outside, in bad weather. This is just a very unusual time when some of those differences are changing in a very visible and very widespread way.
No, not exactly. RTO efforts now are simply taking things back to the pre-pandemic normal. The pandemic was the excuse to go remote, if it’s no longer the excuse and if you can’t argue the benefits from a position of strength successfully to your organization…it comes off as a selfish benefit only available to a select few.
I have absolutely no problem shooting the shit over text, voice, or video chat, and since I went mostly-remote, I have had a number of highly productive conversations over Zoom that looked a lot like a typical casual interaction resulting in good brainstorming. In fact, some of those times, it was even easier to communicate what we needed because one or another of us could share our screens (which is fine in person when you happen to be at someone's desk, or carrying your laptop with you, but if you just run into each other at the water cooler, it often requires a "hey, I'll send you that thing when I get back to my desk and we can continue this over email" or whatever).
I think the biggest thing that far too many RTO proponents fail to understand is that different people work differently, have different experiences, and need different environments to be most effective. This has been hidden to a large extent by the fact that (nearly) everyone has been required to work in an office, but now that we've all experienced something different, many of us have seen firsthand that we can do just as well or even so much better if we're not forced into a particular box.