Why would we trust the same leaders who never overcame proximity bias when it came to people who spent more time in the office versus those who got work done to figure out how much flexibility employees should have? They’re not good at any of this.
You may notice how frequently the words “intentional” or “on purpose” appear. With remote teams, nothing is left to chance encounters, because there aren’t chance encounters.
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When good talent does leave, as the article mentions, they often cite the need to get away from their manager. However, bad managers don’t exist in a vacuum. They are created in a poor culture, which comes straight from the top.
Then, when the labor market pendulum swings back the other way and there aren’t enough qualified workers to fill the jobs that it turns out AI can’t do, these same workplaces will come out talking about how they’ve always supported worker mental health, they even have an EAP hotline for workers!
Could you not buy it for a second? If they aren’t doing it now, they don’t care. If they don’t care, you owe them nothing more than what your wages buy them. This is what young people in the workplace understand, and many of us who have been around are starting to see as well. We owe them nothing more than what they pay for. The rest of our lives belong to us.