Complaint Department

I spend a good amount of time on LinkedIn. I tend to check it at least once a day, to keep up with friends and former co-workers, and simply to get a sense of what things are like. It's mostly a white-collar platform, and so it's only a slice of the broader picture, but it happens to be the one I spend most of my time in, so it's useful.

There are a lot of posts that are, for lack of a better word, affirmational. They tend to affirm what the author believes their audience, or the greater LinkedIn community, understands to be true about the broader world. This has meant that, for the past couple of years, there has been a steady stream of posts about remote work, and why any business that hasn't fully embraced the work-from-anywhere ethos is run by idiots who are destroying their company.

Today LinkedIn "Suggested" (a.k.a. dumped into my feed) a recruiter telling a story of two engineers who were told by their manager when they started that the roles would be fully remote only for: "Both got yanked back to the office with zero warning." For this recruiter, the problem was the company not keeping it's promises and going back on commitments.

But companies don't make binding promises or commitments to employers by having their managers tell them something. They write them into contracts. Because businesses are like everyone else; sometimes, they have to respond to changing circumstances. And sometimes, those circumstances can be something as trivial as a new executive, with a different outlook on things.

Commitments, promises, vows or what have you, come a few basic varieties, but I'm going to talk about two of them here. On the one hand, we have accountable commitments. These are the ones that come with consequences for violating them; anything from a loss of reputation where it counts, fines or, in serious instances, even people going to jail. And pretty much the one thing that all accountable commitments come with is documentation; somewhere, you can find the terms and conditions, even if they're arcane and hard to parse. (This is, after all, why mankind invented lawyers.)

The other sort of commitment that's relevant here is aspirational. In effect, the party making the commitment hopes they can keep up their end of the bargain, but if they can't, then c'est la vie. They alter the deal, and get on with things. This is not to say that there wasn't a genuine effort made, or that it was all a sham from the beginning, but these are the sorts of things that often come down to verbal agreements, and understandings between people who aren't in a position to agree to accountability measures.

And as far as I'm concerned, a manager telling a candidate "Yes, this is a fully remote role," is fully aspirational. It's the sort of thing that only really remarkable employees are ever going to have formally written into an employment contract, especially as an individual contributor. Because it's the sort of thing that companies don't want to be legally held to when things change. Even if that change is simply a new executive. And employees should understand this. Because it's a common occurrence. There's more labor, especially in the United States at the moment, than there is a need for, and that means that employers don't have to make accountable commitments over things like remote work in order to find people. And that gives them a level of flexibility that they value.

In the end, the recruiter who made the post went on to warn businesses that employees were paying attention to how well they kept their commitments, and would talk to one another. Accordingly, businesses that didn't clean up their act would face reputational damage. Just not in this case. Because, as in most instances of "bad employers who want people in the office," no names were named.