A company I used to work for during the pandemic (before becoming a founder) was very very deep into the culture wars of RTO mandates. They had a cycle of HR m

A company I used to work for during the pandemic (before becoming a founder) was very very deep into the culture wars of RTO mandates. They had a cycle of HR making big sweeping proclamations, followed by leadership (a group I was part of) spending 2-3 months trying to corral the raging employee anthill it created, settling into a norm of no one really doing it, and then a few months later HR would decree RTO and start the cycle all over again. It was hugely frustrating and disruptive to a workforce that, at the engineering level, really just wanted to do good work they could be satisfied with and live their lives outside of that. The overwhelming sense that I had was just confusion. It was a company who’s entire overcomplicated and wildly over engineered business essentially ground down to running a very niche and specific service for our clients. They spent _so much_ time focusing on RTO chaos and changing internal systems, reorgs, reworking processes, moving and consolidating branches; things that are NOT “run this service for our customers”. I am always just baffled at the amount of attention this type of thing gets from companies. As a now-owner, my feeling is that you should care about exactly one thing: doing $YOURS_BUSINESS more so that customers give you money. Anything that distracts from that is something that deserves the minimum amount of attention you can give it to be dealt with before getting back to your core business of doing the thing you’re good at so people give you money. RTO mandates (note: not working in office as I recognize some people’s preference for that, but the mandate) are so hugely distracting and bear such an enormous cost in talent, finances, productivity - it touches every area of the business in a negative way. I will never understand how some people can justify it to themselves, not because of some moral argument or anything but just because of the distraction and cost it causes. But, it was the final push I needed to go do my own thing, and that’s a very happy new norm for me. So maybe I should be thanking them?