Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

Remote work, when done correctly can be amazing. Most employers I've been with the last 6 years have been remote first and my personal experience has been very positive. My team, even those not in the same timezone, had a pretty good overlap on working hours. Communication via Slack/Zoom/Meet was near instantaneous. We got together once or twice a year at an offsite.

I also think it depends on the type of work you do, your team, and personal discipline. Not everyone is suited for remote work. So I hate blanket statements of "WFH is the future" or "WFH is the worst thing ever."

Remote work requires trust from management, but also personal discipline from remote employees. Some absolutely abuse it. Some companies are just not setup for remote work. And some jobs, even if possible remotely, aren't well suited for it.

But yes I agree with your last point, guidance is necessary on how to work remotely.

Sounds like you experienced a particular company's flavor of WFH, which sounds mostly worse than all the ones I have.

I've also seen situations that start to go bad like you describe, but in some cases we were able to nudge it back. For example, someone tries to schedule a meeting for a week away, so you push for a quick ad hoc call in a few minutes instead. (Not that different than in-person, when someone says "let's schedule a meeting".)

I've also seen experiments in WFH communication and team-building that aren't done well. For example, starting Monday morning with a ineffective all-hands that, rather than getting people on the same page and energized, sucks the life out of any refreshed start of the workweek. (Again, similar to if you'd herded everyone in-person into a large physical room, for the same content and delivery, only in-person is poorer view and harder to hear.)

Also, in the worst situations I'm aware of, it wouldn't matter much whether the people were in-person. You might figure out more quickly that there's a problem, or where the problem is originating, but that's not been the hardest part.

What in-person is best at is humanizing/personalizing people and forming bonds easily, with all the little cues that we've known since the '80s aren't conveyed as well through computers, and still aren't. (Well, for many people; other people are less comfortable in some in-person contexts, for various reasons, and tend to be more comfortable and themselves in other modalities.)

There's also the occasional high-bandwidth highly-interactive collaborative design, but there's no reason most of that can't happen mostly WFH when your timezones overlap and you have good tools (e.g., effective shared whiteboarding/diagramming that's actually better than a physical whiteboard).

Personally, my ideal is WFH, but being in-town or an easy commute away, for occasional high-value in-person interaction. With in-person emphasis on humanizing/personalizing/bonding (but naturally; I've seen these done in well-intentioned but miserable ways that people just try to get through, and it can be counterproductive).

Honestly, the type of execs having huddles like that likely don't need work/life balance because they're 100% corporate cult company men anyway.

Normal people, with normal life priorities and who find joy in many things outside the workplace seem to enjoy WFH. Their work doesn't define them.

This kind of sweeping policy change without consultation of the people it affects would be an immediate resignation from me.

I’m on a similar situation - managing a small team and got very similar perceptions.

If my company tries to enforce more than a couple days in office, I’m jumping somewhere else.

In-person people tend to at least see "oh s/he's super-focused on something, I should probably not interrupt them if it's not important"