Why is it that remote workers never insist on everyone working from home, but RTO people want every single person to RTO? Just leave it up to the individual worker.
Is there an issue with this? The pro-remote people want the environment they thrive in and the pro-office people want the environment they thrive in.
The remote workers’ cry of “We can work at home and you can work in the office” or “I don’t care where you work” is forcing the in-office coworker to do something they don’t want to do — work in an office with people who aren’t there.
Getting the exact work environment you desire isn’t a guarantee at work. And again, this is absolutely fine. It’s fine to love remote work and it’s fine to hate it. It’s fine for a business to make everybody come into the office, it’s fine for a business to make everyone work at home, and it’s fine to go hybrid or whatever.
I totally by this might be a CEO power trip, but that doesn't also mean its an individualist ("I'm a star IC nothing else matter") brain rot. Star ICs do not a functioning org make.
If the in-person team doesn't like working remotely because they prefer to communicate and make decisions in-person, those conversations/decisions will have to be propagated to the remote team, for the company to function.
My gut feeling is that at some point, an important decision will be made in-person and not propagated, leading to confusion, lack of coordination, etc. Then, politics will ensue because the in-person team might feel like they're making concessions to the remote-team, and that the remote-team is always lagging behind, that the bulk of the decision-making responsibility are on the in-person team's shoulders, etc.
I'm 100% speculating, but I can see it happen.
I think for people in the Bay Area maybe this might not be the case. But other places in the world don't have the same kind of plethora of options.
For me, it's work remote, or take a massive paycut and work on far less interesting and satisfying work. But I also don't like working remote. So, yeah...
Count the times you see someone arguing WFH while admitting any degree of abuse like we all know it is.
To hear people here tell it, they would never do the things we all know happen.
They do insist that all meetings have some video conferencing on. Also, to avoid side conversations, many of them ask that everyone in the meeting - even those sitting the same office - sign into the video conferencing software.