Assuming we have open communication, I would respond to the CEO's email and propose implementing a different policy - if we are expected to come to the noisy distracting office where it is hard to get work done, managers must send an email asking us, explaining why it is necessary, and it will be up to the engineer's discretion to determine whether or not he wants to lower his productivity by coming in.
Heh, I do like this. Mostly because it fits with the philosophy around soul-sucking time-wasting meetings, most of which are often started at the behest of management, which often have no purpose, focus or goals associated with them.
However, the only organizations where something like this would have a snowball's chance would be those that don't already have a dysfunctional management culture. In which case you probably wouldn't be so put off by either approach since you would already have a relationship of trust, the freedom to decided to do what is needed and a general lack of resentment towards management and the business in the first place.
Yes, the problem in the given scenario is that there is a certain number of specific employees who are saying they are working from home but are doing shopping, taking the kids to school and doctor, watching TV, running errands, surfing the net and so forth, never getting around to actually doing any work.
As you point out, the "approval method" is a elaborate attempt to hide the fact that unproductive employees ABC are now not allowed to work from home and productive employees DEF are still allowed to. Rather than communicate this directly to persons ABC, an elaborate system of misleading emails is constructed.
A more effective and less damaging way to handle this is to meet individually with the specific persons who are having problems and explain it has become clear they are not productive when working from home, and so they'll have to work from their office from now on. And if that doesn't work out, then they can be dismissed.
Instead of handling this situation in the obvious manner, which would be effective and would not publicly shame anyone, we have two emails proposed to be sent to the entire company establishing a global policy to deal with a minority of people who are having problems. The wording doesn't matter, the problem is that the email is sent to everyone to deal with a specific problem with specific employees.
This is done this way because management is comprised of ineffective cowards who are terrified of confrontation and communication.
These emails show that the real problem here is highly ineffective management. To improve things management needs to change their ways or get out.
> This is done this way because management is comprised of ineffective cowards who are terrified of confrontation and communication.
This one sentence sums up why managers won't directly confront these problems, but instead apply new policies to the whole group: Employees often lack empathy for their managers, and when given criticism, will take it very personally. (I'm not blaming employees. I think this is human nature.) Managers don't want to risk pissing off an employee who, while good, has one or two things that could be improved. Better to have a slightly less happy but still productive employee.
That's not to say that the policies are often not asinine, but my suspicion is that draconian policies are often the result of management not having enough time to deal with the issue in an intelligent way combined with a small handful of employees who don't make good judgements when left to their own discretion.
You're very right. I've only had one boss I disliked/didn't respect, but I've always worked at small companies.
At larger companies, managers are more beholden to their bosses than you. At my current company, my manager knows that I provide value to the company, so if his boss told him to fire me, he'd fight for me. Empathy: granted.
If I were working at say, IBM, seventeen levels down from the CEO, the manager would be more worried about being fired by his boss than he would be about my loss of productivity. So if his boss told him to fire me, I'd be out looking for a new job. Empathy: lost.
Absolutely! Confronting the people who are abusing the system is much more effective and doesn't affect the group morale (the general email would effectively punish everyone because of those few). Managers should, y'know, manage.
Assuming we have open communication, I would respond to the CEO's email and propose implementing a different policy - if we are expected to come to the noisy distracting office where it is hard to get work done, managers must send an email asking us, explaining why it is necessary, and it will be up to the engineer's discretion to determine whether or not he wants to lower his productivity by coming in.