>>And professionalism to them means butts in chairs.
What this really means is NOT what they said ("...bigger stuff needs more in-person coordination, blah, blah,blah...").
It is actually the phenomenon found by a long-ago study of remote vs in-person management (I wish I could locate it). It found that teams under good managers are actually made better by remote work, and teams under bad managers were made worse. The good managers focused on results, while the bad managers focused on indicators of work (time spent in chairs, at screens, in meetings, etc.).
In short, remote work amplifies the differences in management quality.
What this study shows is that larger companies have overall lower quality and far larger quantity of bad managers.
What they really need for performance is not more office time, as that will only paper over the problem of bad managers. What they need is far greater investment in good management (methods, training, etc.).
What this really means is NOT what they said ("...bigger stuff needs more in-person coordination, blah, blah,blah...").
It is actually the phenomenon found by a long-ago study of remote vs in-person management (I wish I could locate it). It found that teams under good managers are actually made better by remote work, and teams under bad managers were made worse. The good managers focused on results, while the bad managers focused on indicators of work (time spent in chairs, at screens, in meetings, etc.).
In short, remote work amplifies the differences in management quality.
What this study shows is that larger companies have overall lower quality and far larger quantity of bad managers.
What they really need for performance is not more office time, as that will only paper over the problem of bad managers. What they need is far greater investment in good management (methods, training, etc.).