My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week …

Even more bizarre considering that there have been numerous studies showing that remote working is more productive and less costly

It's about rule and control. Some people see employees as "less than equals" and they need a thumb on them at all times. Others are steeped in Right-Wing Bullshit and are willing to burn it all to the ground for one more profitable quarter.

It's part of "hostile environment" tactic to force reduction in headcount without appearing to be firing anyone. That it results in more experienced people leaving is just a bonus to the all-governing excel chart that gives orders to the CEO.

Does 4-day week policy mean you have to be in the office 4 days a week, or that your work week is 4 days long?

4-day work week is a "gift" to keep people in the office, and I hope it FAILS miserably because being in the office in 2024 it's not different than dress like ancient Celts to go to a court. A nonsense. Some want slaves and to ensure them, to reach the "in 2030 you'll own nothing" they need the city, tall buildings used less than half of the day moving between them for the rest of the day only to keep people busy and unable to own. This is simply untenable: a city can't really evolve and we are in changing world and in a changing society, cities to change needs to be rebuild, something impossible for actual available resources, we must be no more than 3 billion to have enough planetary resources to evolve in cities, while we can be the double to live spread and have more intelligence and ideas being more in a spread model where we can evolve and sustain the climate change as well. That's…

Oh hey, our new CEO did the same exact "hybrid 4" bullshit so he technically didn't violate our employment contracts that said we were hybrid employees. Literally at his 6 month mark announced a thing that made everyone hate him which is a pretty bold move for a new CEO. The only person who supported him was a newly hired director who was kissing ass so hard it almost a rimjob. I just don't get it, there was no issue that caused the change, no metric he was looking to improve. He even told us he was willing to eat 20% productivity to be in the office. But turns out the overlap between someone willing to write code all day and adhd is pretty strong so my team all put in the paperwork for ADA exceptions and got them, literally the only reason I'm still here.

My experience has been that "spin off" CEOs are often there only so they can check a "CEO experience" box in the hope that it will help them climb higher in the larger corporation. This leads to all sorts of bad decisions and a pretty miserable environment because they don't actually care about building something that will be successful and endure. They only care about speedrunning the experience they think a CEO needs so they can talk about it when interviewing for something better.