> it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. Do you mean the majority? Because that is not

> it is important to note that there is a significant percentage of employees that want to go back to the office. Do you mean the majority? Because that is not true. The percentage of employees that want to go back and that doesn't want to go back are both significant and comparable. The question, as you say, is how to make everyone happy, but the meta-question is, does everyone really need to be happy? A hybrid solution makes the "officer"s partially happy but non-"officer"s completely unhappy. A flexible solution makes officers happy and at advantage, but non-officers at a career disadvantage for being deprived of, among other good things, also all the schmoozing, self-marketing etc that takes place. Also the breakdown of the "employees" is important. Not just execs but also mid-managers seem to be particularly unhappy with current setup because having the self-organizing IC to IC interactions reduced, managers' organization and coordination skills have been put under serious test. I am not saying only bad managers want RTO, but their shortcomings do get foregrounded more. > Finally, there will always be under-performers who are desperately searching for a scape goat when they fail to deliver. I think this is another problem of the managers' performance. Now it is up to their capabilities to steer up or weed out those chronic scape-goaters. Also I think it is very important to operationalize the term "under-performer". There is a reason for having performance tiers and their proportionate rewards; anyone who is not operating at full-performance can be considered an under-performer, but that is OK and the employee's choice unless they are in the lowest tier. That's what most ICs have been wising up to; it is easier to not cave into the peer pressure of an office environment to feel you always have to perform at top. You can totally pick a tier and have a proportionate work performance in comparison to your life performance, i.e. your other life goals. For the first time in a while a great majority of employees got a feel of what is to be not living for work. I mean, this is not even just tech, eg. restaurant workers have been quitting disproportionately, due to many things, but also for realizing they just don't need to put up with the unnecessary pressure and rude clients. > The trick is for executives to wrangle all of these new challenges at once... People haven’t been trained how to make this new world work... How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so? That is literally their job to handle and steer the ship under ambiguous conditions. I absolutely don't think it is anyone's but their burden to find a working solution. If they find it too stressful, they can quit, or take comfort in their exec salaries.