@bb Leadership absolutely does not care / is not interested in employees' opinions around requirements to work fully in office. The only employees OT would have concern about in terms of a "mass exit" is sales coded employees. The "do you plan to quit" in 6 months question on the post-GTM survey was specifically targeted for sales because this was a concern during the GTM change planning and noted by the company that worked with OT on the GTM model as a risk to rollout success.
It's awful and I feel it is unfair for employees who are office based. The company has no issue if an employee resigns, especially in this market because for every marketing, enablement, product, etc. employee on the payroll, there are thousands of job seekers. Also, all of these positions are not geo dependent. OT would love nothing more than to replace a US employee in high cost areas with Canada - based employees. Plus, EVERY non sales position needs review and approval before it is refilled.
The one way out is to request an exception and come up with a valid, documented reason. If your exception request is supported by your manager and your manager's manager and so on, it will make its way to your ELT leader and if your ELT leader approves, these exception requests get managed by an outside company to be sure it is legal. There are employees who have been pursuing this since the corporate announcement of the change. Medical exceptions have the best success rate.
The biggest roadblock is your direct manager. When corporate rolled out the RTW program they emphasized with managers they were to support this effort. It would take a strong, independent manager to go against that vibe because it would call attention to them and their own leadership skills.
What is unfortunate is that before the pandemic, there were many, many global companies that had a virtual – remote work policy, when everyone went remote during the pandemic. After the pandemic, many of those companies grabbed on to the hybrid work model and some later the full office model. This means that there are very few global companies today who offer a full virtual role or even hybrid role.