My wife is currently going through almost this exact same scenario in the UK. Copy/pasted from a post I made a few weeks ago:
It started with shallow platitudes about "getting back to normal" and it being "easier to vibe with each other". Apparently the CEO gave a rare appearance one day and he didn't like how empty the office was. Two or three days a week in office were then required.
Then company-wide weekly updates stopped being delivered online and are now in-person only, with no justification, despite employees from smaller branches being too far away to attend them. Now she is required to attend a fouth day each week to account for this deliberate contrivance.
When she raised concerns about this trajectory, and asked the justification for it, she was pressured by upper-middle management to essentially not question it and to limit such "outbursts" in future. It was strongly implied that her career progression would be impacted if she didn't, though she suspects it has been already.
She's privately been approached by colleagues and told that they share her concerns, but they feel unable to voice them. They seem to want her to continue fighting it but she's pretty much decided to not rock the boat any further while she looks for another job to move on to.
Interestingly, it seems that some of her more extroverted colleagues who do prefer to work in the office, and do so five days a week, seem to have been almost personally offended by my wife's questioning of the policy, and her interactions with them have been noticeably frosty since. I can see that divide among workers factoring into the success of the current attempts to rollback WFH rights.
PrimalWrath t1_j9t3ozy wrote
Reply to Return to Office - My experience & rationalization. by [deleted]
My wife is currently going through almost this exact same scenario in the UK. Copy/pasted from a post I made a few weeks ago:
It started with shallow platitudes about "getting back to normal" and it being "easier to vibe with each other". Apparently the CEO gave a rare appearance one day and he didn't like how empty the office was. Two or three days a week in office were then required.
Then company-wide weekly updates stopped being delivered online and are now in-person only, with no justification, despite employees from smaller branches being too far away to attend them. Now she is required to attend a fouth day each week to account for this deliberate contrivance.
When she raised concerns about this trajectory, and asked the justification for it, she was pressured by upper-middle management to essentially not question it and to limit such "outbursts" in future. It was strongly implied that her career progression would be impacted if she didn't, though she suspects it has been already.
She's privately been approached by colleagues and told that they share her concerns, but they feel unable to voice them. They seem to want her to continue fighting it but she's pretty much decided to not rock the boat any further while she looks for another job to move on to.
Interestingly, it seems that some of her more extroverted colleagues who do prefer to work in the office, and do so five days a week, seem to have been almost personally offended by my wife's questioning of the policy, and her interactions with them have been noticeably frosty since. I can see that divide among workers factoring into the success of the current attempts to rollback WFH rights.