It isn’t a binary issue where remote work is “good” or “bad”. It’s more nuanced where sometimes remote work makes a lot of sense and sometimes it doesn’t. This depends on a number of factors including your particular role at Nike, your org, the culture & people within your org, tenure, and several other factors.
As an example my team hired three people during the pandemic. Two of those three people left within 10 months and 14 months, respectively. Why? It was too difficult to learn their jobs being 100% remote. Not everything can be learned remotely; to say nothing of making personal relationships with people that are important in allowing you to get your own work done. That was a serious barrier for these two people and both understandably quit in frustration.
I know of certain other functions at Nike where literally, physically being there can and often does make a huge difference between success and failure. Because again, not every skill can be effectively transmitted and learned remotely.
With the remote work debate this aspect is something I usually don’t see people acknowledge. Instead the base assumption is that everyone can at all times effectively do their jobs 100% remotely. I’m telling you from personal experience that isn’t always true.
Ideally Nike would recognize this important nuance and allow org managers to determine what makes the most sense for their particular org. With the understanding that some people will have wide latitude to work remotely and some won’t. Instead Nike is mostly going with a “one size fits all” policy that is guaranteed to not please everyone.
When discussing this topic it would be useful for people to remember that Nike is a large company with a lot of roles that are night and day different from each other. Some of those roles are perfectly suited for remote work and some aren’t. Even within those roles some people are perfectly suited for remote work and some aren’t.
I also wouldn’t totally discount the culture aspect. If Nike had always been a remote work company would it be as successful as it is today? While we can’t know for certain my guess would be “No”. A lot of good ‘stuff’ happens for no other reason than you have the right group of people literally sitting in the same room together. Can that dynamic be replicated in a remote environment? Sometimes. But certainly not always. Thinking of my own experiences here over a decade, the biggest wins I’ve had and the best times I’ve had involved and even necessitated people being physically present with each other. Here too it’s difficult to say with any degree of certainty how those same things would have panned out if every stakeholder was remote. My gut tells me some of the magic that created those successes would have been lost.
In other words the issue of remote work isn’t the black and white issue many attempt to make it. My own hope is that Nike allows more delegation of these decisions so that we can ultimately arrive at a place that makes the most sense for the greatest number of people.
This is the best commentary I've read on the issue of remote work/RTO here. It deserved its own thread. OP is @1kme+1kOUbks4.