TLDR: company is doing a spectacular display of power, imposing a sudden, poorly planned, hardly justified "Return to Office" policy - 2 days a week, handling concerned employees without compassion, and a with dictatorial hand. --- A very recent and abrupt rupture in CrowdStrike's philosophy - all employees working on the Product team (software engineers, testers, product managers, engineering managers, designers, etc) are called back to office, mandatory 2 days per week. People have signed contracts in the last years, with "100% remote work" being one of the main reasons they signed it. For years the company has functioned as "remote-first", coming to office being completely voluntarily, But now utterly unexpectedly, one of the main strong points of CrowdStrike (all infrastructure and processes adapted for 100% remote work) has been canceled, ripped apart by the "senior leadership / exec team". This has been such a bad, deceitful, inconsiderate move against employees, without any kind of survey or even a decent argument/motivation from the Exec team. Immoral and unethical on all dimensions - from the way they basically fooled everyone with the "remote-first culture", to the way they phrased the sudden email announcing it, or the short timeline when it must take effect (within 1 week), to how they "handled" people who voiced concerns, or even the undersized offices in most cities (because they hired like crazy remotely, but offices remained so small, unprepared for everyone having zoom meetings all day - because you still need to work with other countries). Leadership motivated with "keeping the culture" or "speeding up onboarding" or "facilitating random conversations" or "better collaborations". it doesn't even make sense. Most people work very closely with people from other countries, other time zones ("remote-first" duh). In the office, most likely you won't have close colleagues. That's ok, but you won't be able to meet over Zoom with _actual_ coworkers from another country, because in the very little time window overlap - you will be commuting. And also, who has time in the office to chat randomly expect for smalltalk/pleasantries ? This company is making people work close to burnout. Sorry leadership, but you are not that good at holding your position. Keeping the culture? Remote culture? The one you just canceled? Ha! People have started to raise concerns against this new policy, they talked a lot publicly on Slack groups. Very civilized, some more passionate than others, but still civilized. People expressed nobody is ready to come back to office, after years of remote, within 1 week (kids? elderly in care? traffic? pollution? wasted time? small offices? no meeting rooms in offices? very basic and non interesting offices? what about those and many other counter arguments for Return to Office?). It is just un_rea_son_a_ble. Exec team has just thrown this greasy bugger at us, and we now have to just eat it. People have requested a relaxation or rollback of this new policy. Many people have been documenting alternatives and elegant plans to implement this reasonably so much more politely, considerately and professionally than the Exec team has been able to when they threw this at us. They had all the time and resources to make a better plan. but they didn't. What leadership did? Fired one the guys who were more vehement against the change, and made another one quit. Leadership basically said "from next week, everybody back to office. No comments on that. Have an exception? Talk to your manager". But what shall managers do? Approve an exception for everybody? What exceptions can be approved? Managers to decide. People are commenting that the Return to Office is just a way to make people quit. Or just a cold-blooded way of micromanaging people to hit the maniacal goals of being number #1, achieving the crazily high revenue targets and of that Wallstreet bulsh. Such an "elegant" use of power. So disappointing. Leadership, are YOU really that underperforming that the only way to run your company is to gather the cows back in the barn? Isn't there anything smarter to try (after cutting bonuses, budgets, rushing up work, tightening deadlines, increasing the pace on all fronts)?
