I left an employer a few years ago to take a remote work job. Hearing from some of the employees after I left, HR took that to mean I left because I didn't want to work in an office, and instituted a "work from home with manager approval" policy, where you can request WFH days and as long as your manager agrees, you can stay home. Of course it means you have to plan ahead to bring your laptop, and if you have a desktop you're stuck working over RDP, and the helpdesk/support guys aren't eligible. And of course this only applies to IT, which was like 20 people out of 2000 employees.

Still, it's a step in the right direction I guess?

In that kind of situation the lack of an office presence is going to be a net negative in many if not most cases. The kind of small, in-house shop you describe tends to be governed very much by office politics and attracts a certain kind of manager who will very happily use the WFH policy as a cudgel as much as he will a carrot.

You're spot-on. They actually used different working shifts as punishments. Technically we were only open 9-5 with limited support staff 24/7 for our website, but some employees had a hard time working and not socializing, so they were asked to come in at off-hours to disrupt the amount of time they shared with other workers. I imagine they're being asked to work from home now, so they have zero face-to-face interactions as another step towards getting them to quit.

We had some employees with a 1+hr commute one-way, so the policy was probably marketed as being nice to them, but I'll bet you're right and it's being used as a punishment for others.

> The interesting thing with Remote is that most companies these days "allows remote" as part of their package.

This question goes for the original post too -- but how many of these are truly remote? i.e. I can work for the majority of the year remotely, with maybe one or two visits to the company main office, if that.

Asking because I see far too many companies these days trying to brand themselves as remote-friendly, when they really mean something with far less freedom, like “We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five”.

Well, when they mention "allows remote", it is mostly not remote (work anywhere, wherever you like, just get things done) from what I gather. This is from a British company in London, "because we love family, and are a family company, we will allow 2 days a week for you to work from anywhere." :-)

I think it's definitely a spectrum.

To me the most important binary distinction is whether it's "remote friendly" meaning you can work from home if you give an excuse, and remote friendly meaning it's expected that you'll be working remotely on a regular basis.

Once you're in that second category there's range from "work from home one to several days a week" and "never set foot in the office again"

I am in the same position.

Which makes me turn down most headhunter's offers as they think “We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five” is good enough for home office.

Somehow they don't understand there are things more relevant than plain salary or having access to a company car.

These are almost explicitly positions where the ___location is marked as Remote. Only a few seep through which might say "Canadians only" for example.