Afterword: I feel like this post is a good litmus test for identifying which respondents are in the C suite lol.

Them: We understand the concerns, but we have decided that the return to the office will be mandatory.

Me: So those who are not comfortable returning to the office will be let go?

Them: No! Yo mean fired? Good heavens, no! No one will be let go. But they will have to return to the office.

"If you park in my driveway again, I will have your car towed" - very clear threat.

"If you go around parking in people's driveways, you run the risk of having your car towed" - maybe a threat, maybe not, depending on how the person says it

"I understand that you parked in my driveway yesterday, because of an emergency. No problem. But if you continue doing it regularly, please be aware that I might need to have your car towed, if I urgently need to use the driveway myself" - I suppose this is a threat too, but probably justifiable.

Maybe others would consider this to be cynical, but I've always considered compensation and job stability to be directly correlated to the amount of value you provide as an employee. If an employer thinks that remote-working will reduce the amount of value I bring to the company, I would certainly expect that to have an impact on my career growth. If my manager tells me this directly, I would thank him for the upfront feedback. I would also consider working for a different company that has a different perspective on this topic... the exact same way I shop around for employers that offer the best work-life balance. But either way, there wouldn't be any hard feelings on my side, and I'm puzzled by the outrage around this article.

What this means is that a good manager will farm work out all over the place finding the right mix of quality / quantity / price.

People will not be paid salaries, they will be paid per unit of work.

Rather than interviewing people to join your family, businesses will be running a continual review of work producs and more carefully measure that mix of quality / quantity / price. Each cycle letting go the least desirable contractors and giving new contractors a try.

On-boarding new contractors will be streamlined, and how fast the contractor gets started will be the first quality control checkpoint.

As an aside, this unethical practice in the media irks me. It's really despicable for the Washington Post to write a headline from the perspective of the CEO, which the CEO never said themselves.

Does anyone know of any good non-partisan orgs that attempt to quantify and track these unethical practices across the media landscape?

Why are executives, regardless of industry, digging in and going to such great lengths to insist that physical presence in a purpose-built office building is the only possible way to work?

>The true issue at hand is not, ultimately, where we will work, but how we will work. Remote work forces you to change the how. It is not a cure for shitty management or a bad business model or a bad product. It is merely an organizing principle — it forces you to the hard work of listening to and trusting employees. It pushes executives to build a culture with intention and long-term vision. >If history is any guide, the business case for remote work HAS been made.

Management is increasingly becoming irrelevant. The fear of being irrelevant will drive all sort of drama as work forces returning to office.

I really can't tell, but the meat of the difference is that the warning would be about what other people will do, not himself. (So it makes sense to publish a warning on the media, but it makes much less rational sense to publish a threat. But there's no reason to be sure he is acting rationally.)

Anyway, it's a very narcissistic comment. CEOs will do what the competition for labor allows them to do, the ones that do anything more will fail. There's a huge and complex society deciding those factors, he (or the ones he is warning about) does not get to choose.

This article is just another typical example of the parasitic administrator class devaluing the people that do real work.

So maybe your reading is a bit too charitable, as it seems like all the employees heard the threat loud and clear.

Second, the CEO published this without talking to a single one of their employees about the issue. Why? "I am concerned about the unfortunately common office worker who wants to continue working at home and just go into the office on occasion." Can you imagine your colleague stating this publicly without ever speaking to you about it? It's incredibly disrespectful. Your neighbor is parked in your driveway out of necessity, and you're within earshot asking a friend "Can you believe these people who think they can park wherever they want? I hope they realize how easy it is to tow a car off your own property."