This whole situation is been a real mess for years. 1) Quiet quitting is primarily the result of disengagement. It is typically an organization failure and no

This whole situation is been a real mess for years. 1) Quiet quitting is primarily the result of disengagement. It is typically an organization failure and not an IC problem. 2) More than a fifth of the workforce was laid off early in the pandemic, causing issues with teams. 3) The pivot to massive hiring during the pandemic tended to ignore the need to be careful about changes to teams and their need to gel. 4) There was an impedance mismatch between individual KPI's and business needs that had been building for years, mainly due to Goodhart's law that also caused disengagement. 5) While RTO mandates were bad enough, firing those who advocated for who they thought was important taught workers that speaking out was forbidden, leading to even more disengagement. 6) While CEOs are back tracking, very few are doing anything that helps an organization recover from this engagement problem. Obviously it is more complicated with activist investors, who sometimes had real estate interests forced the hand of some companies, but after seeing that it really failed as a tricky way to do a RIFF and had high costs that had a long tail, they are changing their story without any acceptance of their own role...same as it ever was. In my experience it takes way longer to get a company to start working as teams, with a shared purpose, than most people expect. Typically 2-5 years in my experience to get most of the org in that mindset. But that is without the very public and visceral impact of RTO related firings, with no communication from Leadership to say they changed course and that the efforts failed to align with core values etc... It is festering, not fading. I turned down two EA jobs in the past 6 months because, as a guardrail/runways EA, there was no way to stay aligned with the CIOs goal and build that sense of shared purpose that would provide value. I am sure that they ended up finding a ivory tower/cop EA, which will just exacerbate the problem. I am sure that there are some Quants in BSG/McKinsey like firms that will blamed for this in a pile of books in a few years.... But C*Os must have known that when they fired people advocating for RTO targets that were important, they must have known that employees would start to delegate up and become less engaged. We could use this crisis to help uplift Managers past their traditional role...as to be honest their need for new tools and tactics has been ignored for way too long. But while CEOs are backing away from RTO mandates, there is little to no evidence that many are making serious efforts to repair the damage. /rant