My last company, a large regional hospital, spent over a decade trying to create a remote work policy. The app and business management side spent all that time

My last company, a large regional hospital, spent over a decade trying to create a remote work policy. The app and business management side spent all that time figuring out which productivity monitoring software to buy. People from the network and security teams got sucked in spending endless cycles trying to figure out how to get these platforms working in our complicated network. Legal and compliance also spent God-knows-how long making sure everything was in line with HIPAA. Rinse and repeat with every pilot and trial of monitoring software. The whole effort was so focused on employee monitoring, other things like security and actual productivity tools and protocols were essentially ignored. In the end nothing was ever formalized and business units just did their own thing. Some never even allowed it. Then COVID-19 hit. The network and security teams spent three weeks+ working on capacity upgrades for things like the VPN and laptops accommodate everyone. Old school managers who had never used anything like Slack or Teams suddenly had to figure out how to manage without patrolling the cubicle farm. During that time, nothing got done because employees were sent home but didn't have the tools to work. If management actually stuck with their charter of creating a remote policy instead of software shopping, they wouldn't have missed a beat.