Yes, they are. They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them. This is exactly the same thing as RTO does to WFH people.
And it's fine! It's just a preference and it's fine for a company to make a decision that makes some people upset.
Those people can deal with it or they can get a new job.
Pushing for only one way of working or the other is telling people how to live. It has been like this for many years because there was little or no alternative. Now "thanks to" the covid an alternative came. But hey, now let's all go back to the traditional way things have always been done.
If a company is fully remote (no offices at all) before you apply you know what you're getting into. Same for a company only working from the office full time.
The issue is the companies slowly going back in a forceful manner, taking away the alternative, and all the people feeling "lonely" or having their "way things should be" being fine with that and actually enforcing this.
All surveys show people want flexibility, yet we're doing a lot to go to the pre 2019 model.
When a company says, "This is how we work," that is them telling you to conform your life to how they work if you want to work there. That's for any value of "this" from remote, in-office, hybrid, whatever.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It just happens that the people who are strongly in favor of remote work don't seem to acknowledge the fact that committing to remote work alienates some workers the same way that in-office work alienates some workers.
"Oh but they can go into the empty office" doesn't solve the problem the way so many pro-WFH people seem to think it does.
You can dislike tradition the same as someone dislikes the nontraditional. They're just preferences not unequivocally right or wrong choices.
Everybody just wants their employer to commit to the preference that they prefer.
If there are so many people missing the office life, why don't they go to the office? Why do they need to be forced?
I really believe given the conversations I had with some colleagues (and others in general) that people who miss the office want an office full or at least 70-80% full because of the way it has always been before covid - it doesn't matter if there is 20% of people, it's just not enough.
This is what I personally don't understand, and this is why I say people are now forcing everyone else to go back to the office. Which is not as those who WFH.
Full remote (no offices etc) is a different beast - I am not talking about that.
This is not at all the same. There is a clear difference, again, between the RTO position which requires positive action from other people (travel in to work, come into a physical location) and the WFH position, which does not require anything of their RTO colleagues beyond what the job requires anyways. How can you not see the difference here?
"They are trying to get people to work with them who don't want to work with them." What is this supposed to mean, concretely? Are you saying that because Bob is not in the office you don't want to work with Bob, but Bob is forcing you to work with him? This is not the argument WFH people are making. It is management that has a vested interest in requiring people to work together. I've never heard a serious proponent of WFH arguing that you have to work with them.
Are you saying that having remote team members requires you to use tools and practices that you don't have to in an in-person setting? I would counter that Jira, Zoom, Slack/Teams, Email, etc., all of these "remote/async" tools are not unique to remote workers. And they pre-date the normalization of remote working. Even in a fully on-prem model the vast majority of companies are still using these tools because of the convenience and control they give management, because they have offices distributed geographically, and because they want to be able to communicate beyond the in-office hours of operation. Again, this is not something that the WFH people are pushing onto the RTO people, it is something management at large has decided for the company.
Really, it's hard to take you seriously and I'm sorry for my attitude, but I can't help but see this as an extremely entitled position that is requiring other people to go out of their way to accommodate your desires. If I'm misunderstanding, please correct me and name a single positive action that a WFH proponent is requiring an in-office proponent take that would not be part of their regular job responsibilities in an in-office setting. Not a "they are depriving me of my preference because they just won't do what I want," but something they are actually requiring you to do.
Each of the 2 groups wants to inconvenience the other group. You’re free to argue “positive action” (whatever that means) or make one group out as worse than the other though. I just happen to think that both are equally right/wrong (which is to say not at all).
> I can't help but see this as an extremely entitled position that is requiring other people to go out of their way to accommodate your desires
Oh, so like when a WFH person says, “I don’t want to ever come into the office”? They’re making anyone whose desires include not working with remote workers accommodate their desires.
Again, I can’t state this plainly enough: Nobody is right and nobody is wrong here.
We’re talking about groups of people with different preferences and unfortunately these preferences are at odds. Two of these groups include:
• People who would like to work in an office only with people who are also in that office – no remote work.
• People who strongly prefer remote work.
It is a question of which group does the company choose to upset. Of course there are other groups involved as well, but you get the idea. Somebody is going to be upset to some degree.
If they choose to upset the pro-office people, they are not wrong! If they choose to upset the WFH people, they are also not wrong! If they choose to upset everyone they are not wrong!
However, I see a very big difference between a preference that requires other people to take specific action to satisfy, and one that does not, and that's exactly the dynamic I see here. It is that expectation that other people will do things that they prefer not to do in order to satisfy your preference that I see as entitled.
As an aside, I'm not arguing right or wrong. I actually see many benefits to a good office environment (see my sibling comment in this discussion for the problem I have, basically that the majority of office environments are not good). I'm arguing coercion vs. freedom. My argument is that the RTO position is coercive in a way that the WFH position is not, that it's not the same.
I will take several simple example to try and explain how I see this difference.
Consider a Christmas party. I want to wear red and green. I don't care what other people wear. I'm not putting any restriction or obligation on other people. I can satisfy my preference through my own actions alone.
Now consider that I wan everyone to wear red and green. I am not going to be happy unless everyone is wearing red and green. In this example I cannot satisfy my preference without convincing or coercing other people to respect my preference. I am expecting my preference to win out over everyone else. I can frame the argument as "why should their (individual) preference to wear white supercede my (collective) preference that we wear green and red?" It is not the same because my preference in this scenario requires other people to actively change what they are doing.
Now, as you have said, this is not necessarily right or wrong (maybe we're taking theme photos, who knows), and I'm not making the argument that WFH is morally superior or necessarily more productive/better in any way. All I am doing is pointing out that your position is coercive in a way that the opposite is not.
