CEO singles out employee during a company meeting and makes a mockery of their request for reimbursement of commute costs amid rising fuel costs and a hypocritical RTO policy: 'He works fully remotely and makes several million a year'

In 2020 and the years immediately thereafter, workers were sold the idea that flexible work and working from home were the future. Certain "global-events-that-shall-remain-nameless" had forced employers, who were faced with the alternative of not having a workforce, to acknowledge that their employees—who only ever had needed a laptop and an internet connection—were in fact able to do their jobs from home… despite years of insisting otherwise.

Fast forward a few years from there until 2025, and suddenly those lessons were forgotten. "Return to Office" became the new norm as aging managers, desperate to get away from their families and escape back into the office like they had their entire lives, began coming up with justifications of why employees were suddenly incapable of doing their jobs from the comfort of their homes any longer, despite having now done so for years.

As with any case, there are, of course, some practical arguments for this. There are certainly some strings of conversation and continuity that can only take place in the office. There's a familiarity, a closeness, that can only be fostered when spending more time together than you do with your family.

But when has "water cooler talk" ever led to a new idea that has taken the company in a bold new direction? But, let's be honest, are we really saying that the pinnacle of "office culture" is basically a form of Stockholm syndrome? Some idea that sheer proximity is enough to spark new ideas?

If anything, it just contributes to the long list of ongoing office distractions that are the reason why there is an increase in productivity when workforces turn to working predominantly from home.

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Employees sit around a boardroom table during a company meeting.
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CEO of my company publicly humiliated me during our town hall

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Rising gas prices have only further contributed to the friction of RTO policies
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I have a counterpoint to the idea that working from the office somehow leads to better ideas spun through collaboration. It is this and it is simple: Deep work.
As Cal Newport lays out in his 2016 book of the same name, we are only growing increasingly fractured and distracted in our lives, and especially our working ones. Incessant email notifications, open offices where workers can't focus on a task in peace, all leave our brains exhausted and anxious, unable to commit to a single problem because of the constant pushing and pulling of the environment around us.
This fractured focus prevents us from committing our minds fully to the task at hand in order to better solve complex problems that face us in our roles, our organizations, and our lives.
And that was 2016, the rise of TikTok, short-form videos, and even more aggressive and curated feeds that are engineered to grab your attention, and hold it, everywhere you turn has done a number on us as a society since that time.
Of course, the billionaire tech CEOs would have you believe that AI is the answer to all of this. You don't need to think for yourself and dedicate your mind to solving problems; AI will do that for you. But offloading your emails, your texts with loved ones, will only further fracture your ability to focus, and further isolate you from the world around you until your brain is a puddle that needs to be scooped up in a jar.
That being said, home is not without its distractions either. I think a lot of us would prefer to have a hybrid working life where we were able to go into an office and collaborate when necessary, or get away from the four walls of our cave that close us in.
But we would desire just as much to be able to retreat from our thousandth conversation about the weather and our coworkers asking us if we caught the game on Saturday.
But there are other considerations to be made. Going into the office does pose additional costs for employees in the form of the cost of transportation, if not for car operation costs and parking, then for public transport.
In the modern working age, the assumption has always been that employees should bear that cost, but now that the workforce has had a taste of the savings of not having to commute into the office, it has left some questioning whether or not their employer should be covering those costs if they're insisting on a Return to Office policy.
As was the case in this workplace, where this employee, facing rising costs of transportation and an aggressive return to office policy, posed the question to their employer as to who should be covering those increasing costs of returning to the office.
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