Could you reign in the cynicism a bit, please?

I'm talking about my entire team, including me. These are people I know and work with on a daily basis. Part of knowing people is that you can tell when they're not quite themselves.

I've also polled my team on a semi-regular basis throughout the last 8 months on their preferences going forward, which is how I know I have a range of preferences across the spectrum of WFH versus working from the office. We've always had a flexible approach in this area because of team has always been distributed, but one of the silver linings of the COVID cloud will, I hope, be a more general acceptance of increased flexibility in working conditions for jobs where that's feasible.

Don't you dare put words into my mouth. Take it elsewhere.

I noticed a very strong current towards employee wellbeing emerge in companies where upper management wants everyone back in the office (for various reasons), and then used to justify why permanent remote work isn't an option. Cynicism is well-deserved.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Your perception on the team might be true, or it might be that people are afraid of saying how they feel for fear of being singled out. We're just sharing anecdotes.

Apologies: I was feeling a bit tired when I wrote the above so, again, sorry for the unjustifiably harsh tone.

Companies are a mixed bag. Some of them behave in ways that are deeply cynical. Plenty also don't, or at least most of the time try to avoid doing so.

I will say one of the reasons for more concern over employee welfare is that more employees, at all grades, are displaying signs that all is not well. It's simply a very unusual situation so, in some sense, the greater noise around welfare is to be expected.

With that being said, and despite my general disdain for cynicism (I live in Cambridge: there's a lot of people who want to play the "world weary cynic" role and it gets old), it does have to be acknowledged that despite the best intentions of employees and leaders at all levels, when push comes to shove a lot of "core values" and "culture" go out the window.

Especially when the choice is that or the company goes under, or that and a shareholder revolt, or you can see the writing on the wall and it's this terrible course of action now or a much worse course of action later. People will also of course choose to use wider market conditions as cover for action they've been planning or perhaps should have taken anyway.

All in all it's grim and, as such, it's one of the reasons that if I ever run a company we will have as few "values" as we can get away with, and we certainly won't be trumpeting our "culture" with any self-serving presentations.

In talking with CIOs and others, as well as just personal interactions with financial institutions and the like, there are a lot of traditional practices and processes that were just "the way things were done." And even if some in authority wondered if they should experiment with this or that change, it probably seemed like a low priority and at least a little bit risky if it didn't work out. What's happened is a bunch of change has been forced. And some of those changes have indeed proven sub-optimal. But a lot have worked out, surprisingly to many, well.

> Nah, it's only an issue now.

It's similar to how the people who would say, "suck it up, buttercup" to people with mental illnesses, are now hand-wringing about mental illnesses exacerbated by measures against COVID. They don't really care, they just found an excuse that sounds good enough to them to rail against something they don't like.