Regarding return to office policy, I hear many speculations and reasons hypothesized. Mostly by employees who don’t really know and who had no choice in it.
I would like to know is if there are any lemmings out there who have been involved in these talks.
What was discussed?
How is something like this coordinated amongst others businesses even rivals.
What are the high level factors that have gone into the decision?
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
I’m at the very bottom level of management, so I’m not invited to these meetings. But I get to hear the story afterwards. The basic jist is that all the old employees are fine to work remote, however, the new employees are largely getting lost. There’s no water cooler meetings or impromptu hallway discussions or ‘hey Jim, I heard you screaming next door, what dumb thing did your customer do?’. The transfer of tribal knowledge isn’t happening when the new folks are remote. As much as I will make fun of the above, I will admit that I learned more of how to do my job through those impromptu ‘meetings’ with my coworkers than I ever did from any formal training.
So, to your point, how do we get back to working from home again? I’m not sure, but I would starting thinking about how to encourage more connections with your coworkers. Not the forced meetings where you talk about why the wiggly line isn’t going up, more like, “hey bob, whacha been up to today? Oh yeah, that system doesn’t work for me either, the trick is you have to log-in through the other portal…”
Suggestion: schedule regular informal zoom calls to trade news, rumors, ask impromptu questions, whatever. Wouldn’t even matter if nobody talked sometimes - people could just have it open and lurk.