[dijit]

Using collaboration and productivity software as a proxy for how the company thinks about collaboration and productivity is, good, actually.

He didn’t say he doesn’t like Satya or Gates or whatever, he was clear that he doesn’t like the solution.

I just went back to a microsoft shop, and honestly while the company is great you can feel how the communication is stilted compared to my previous company. Those little edges, warts, unreliable loading moments and awkward loading times all sum up to people being disincentivised to create, edit and consume documents or even to chat.

This inexplicably drives meeting culture as async communication just doesn’t happen. I totally understand why its primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.

[kenjackson]

“I totally understand why it’s primarily MSFT shops that have RTO mandates.”

That just seems factually incorrect. I’ve seen no correlation on RTO and tools used. Do you have data on this?

[dijit]

Only anecdotes across 20 or so companies (and: european ones).

Companies that use Teams as primary communication software have all had strong and non-negotiable RTO mandates, companies that use o365 and Slack allow exceptions for certain individuals and teams, but have also had RTO requirements.

Those that are using gsuite or are paying lip service to email and documents (excel, word etc) and using mostly Confluence and something like Slack for most communication are the only ones with proper flexible working.

Now, I could be wrong, and there's no public data to back this up. If I think about how I would construct such a dataset I can't even fathom how; even if I was to check every company with an RTO mandates MX records there would be no way to control for the sheer dominance of O365, and, no way to tell who is only playing lip service to their productivity suites.

I'd be interested in hearing other opinions, but like mentioned, it feels pretty universal. I haven't seen even a single exception to this, and I'm pretty old and I have friends across many companies.