| None these things are immutable laws of work though. They can all be fostered in a remote first environment, its just not the same thing. Its a "lazy" solution to require RTO for the sake of collaboration, training etc. as there are demonstrated examples (like GitLab, for instance, also see companies like Linear, Supabase etc that are full remote and still pushing out great work). While I get sometimes in person meetings are great, they really start to lose their effectiveness past a certain point, and I think thats pretty clear with these remote first companies that are successful is they took the time to re-think process, re-think culture, and re-think the approach. What I find with RTO companies is they want to plug their ears to the idea of real change, because its a real effort to get everyone to do things a bit differently. For example, look at the struggles everyone seems to have around maintaining useful documentation and async communication. One thing I realized is companies that took remote seriously gravitated away from everything being a Zoom call and started pushing in earnest centralized documentation and async communication. Long form responses became the norm. In depth Wiki's became the norm. Those are two examples I've seen in successful remote environments that I think, anecdotally, remain true across the board. Companies that don't give this real thought are the ones that seem to also be going back to RTO. To me, RTO is an implicit acknowledgement that the culture of the company is unchangeable, and leadership is unable to consider different ways people work. You can have all this in remote first cultures, that much is clear. That said, I think it should be everyone's individual choice, if one was to ask me. I have no issue with people wanting to work an office everyday, but forcing everyone to work in an office every day is the problem |