It might be good to define "required". Maybe "employees are sanctioned if they work from home without making arrangements with their manager through some formal channel"?

@JonahWeissman “required” would mean that there is no hybrid work policy, and the official policy is that they need to be in the office for five days a week (or however many days the company requires their employees to work - if we reach a 4 day work week in the next year), as just happened with Amazon.

It shouldn’t matter what happens to employees if they disobey this change, as the change itself is the critical bit.

@mattyb Amazon's change was a little squishier than that

Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.

It's not clear (to me at least) that Amazon's announcement is that big of a break with the current policy. It could potentially indicate a change in messaging or a requirement that employees report their reason for working from home. I think a lot hinges on how it's enforced