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MBAification and an entire group of execs who only knew post 2008 management principles which didn't require you to do training or skill development of your employees just use the bad labor market to give yourself the ability to pick someone who took on debt to get the skills you wanted.

Working for a company that isn't based in the US has been a friggin trip. I was on a call with a guy a few rungs above me, and he told me, "So, I don't know if you ever do this, but when I've got a meeting I don't really need to participate in, I listen on my phone while I take my dog for a walk."

I told my boss that per the guidance from the COO, the hybrid policy was not about performance but about "water cooler collaboration" and in that case I would block out the hours before and after lunch every T/Th for "commute", eat lunch in the cafeteria and go home to do my work.

My completely unsupported notion on this is it's possible a much larger percentage of senior leaders today are career senior leaders and not people who worked their way up from initially being workers. Upsides and downsides to that, but that would also go a long way toward explaining the disconnect.

a lot of executives viewed RTO exclusively through the eyes of an executive and were (and remain) extremely hostile to the idea that their experience wasn’t representative of the rank and file experience, and this wasn’t always the case

At my company you could tell execs thought about rto a lot because they instituted it by email as like "this is mandatory within a few weeks" and didn't think through seat/office assignment since we now had a smaller office post covid

I worked for a national nonprofit that supposedly cared about its employees. The RTO was basically at the discretion of the director, unless the VP thought that your WFH was a workaround for child care. Or mental health. The wall between our offices was very thin and wellllll...VP was an ass..

It's also worth noting that senior leaders and executives are, for the most part, entitled halfwit white guys who have spent their careers failing upward. Their only meaningful skills are playing golf with other entitled halfwits and asking their wives to dress them in the morning. That's it.

ohhhhh yeah

I work at a mid-sized manufacturer, ~10k employees a few billion in sales. I had a project manager role that got me close to working with upper management. What blew my mind was that everyone in leadership wanted to keep WFH until you got all the way up to the president and board who wanted RTO

anecdotes aren't data but this absolutely trickles down to middle management too; my mom spent like 40 years as a project manager at BNY (retired) & she INSISTS that office work leads to Camaraderie and More Productivity. i cannot explain to her that her experiences are not universal.

a lot of my coworkers are bad at their jobs whether they are at home or in the office, I don't see why I also have to be punished alongside them

I blame it on corporate leadership being a goat rodeo of people who are basically all sociopaths in one form or another and have never done the actual work, aka the “financialization of the c-suite”.