The open floor plan detail is the part of this that I cannot stop thinking about. We went through a campus redesign a couple of years before the mandate and the stated goal was to encourage spontaneous collaboration. What it actually created was an environment where nobody can do focused work and everyone has learned to put headphones on and stare at a screen, which is exactly what they were doing at home except now they are commuting two hours a day to do it in a more expensive building. The executives who designed the space and the executives who issued the mandate are in many cases the same people. They experience neither the commute nor the floor plan because when they are physically present they are in private offices or conference rooms that got quietly preserved through the redesign.

The logic you are asking someone to explain with a straight face is this: the mandate was never primarily about collaboration or innovation. It was about real estate commitments, political optics around remote work, and manager discomfort with not being able to observe the people they manage. None of those rationales survive public scrutiny so they get translated into culture language that sounds better. The exemption for senior leadership is not hypocrisy in the sense of people knowing the rule and breaking it. It is a different rule that was never stated. The stated rule is four days for everyone. The actual rule is four days for everyone who does not have enough organizational power to negotiate an exception. That is a real thing that organizations do and it corrodes trust faster than almost anything else because everyone can see it happening.
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We went through a campus redesign a couple of years before the mandate and the stated goal was to encourage spontaneous collaboration. What it actually created was an environment where nobody can do focused work. The executives who designed the space and the executives who issued the mandate are in many cases the same people. They experience neither the commute nor the floor plan.

Leadership living out of state while mandating RTO is a total slap in the face.

The "Teams call from a cubicle" reality is what gets me. If the leaders aren't even in the same time zone, let alone the building, the whole "collaboration" argument falls apart. It’s just a massive waste of everyone's time and gas money.

This "do as I say, not as I do" leadership is killing morale. Driving an hour to sit on Teams calls while the bosses dial in from Montana is peak corporate absurdity. If collaboration is so vital, why aren't they in the room with us? It's pure hypocrisy.

It’s the blatant "rules for thee, but not for me" that kills morale. If being physically present is truly essential for culture, why are the leaders exempt? Commuting an hour to sit on a webcam in a noisy office while they dial in from Montana is peak corporate hypocrisy.

The "rules for thee" approach is a total morale killer. Driving an hour to sit in a loud office just to call someone in a different state is the definition of insanity. It’s clearly about control, not culture, and everyone sees right through the corporate buzzwords.

It’s the "commute to Zoom" reality that really stings. Driving an hour just to hop on a call with an executive in another state proves this isn't about collaboration. It’s just theater, and it’s exhausting to watch leadership ignore the very rules they claim are vital for culture.

The part worth naming directly is that the RTO mandate at most OEMs was never really about collaboration. It was about real estate commitments, visible headcount activity ahead of restructurings, and giving managers a tool to manage out people they could not otherwise move on easily. Remote employees who do not come in are easier to put on a performance plan. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is just how large organizations behave under cost pressure. The open floor plan that makes focus work impossible is a separate but related failure: the people who designed it also do not sit in it.