Let’s get this straight: Steve McMillan earned the right to work from home. Period. The man took a legacy company stuck in the 1990s and dragged it into the cloud era. He rebuilt investor trust, stabilized revenue with subscriptions, and kept Teradata relevant when everyone had written it off. That’s not small stuff—that’s what kept thousands of paychecks flowing.
And yet here we are, employees acting like RTO is some kind of human rights violation. Sorry, but if your biggest contribution is answering emails in sweatpants and ducking meetings with your camera off, you don’t get the same privileges as the CEO. Leaders get flexibility. Workers get structure. That’s how it’s always been.
RTO isn’t about punishing employees—it’s about productivity and culture. Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. Collaboration doesn’t mean muting your mic and half-listening while you scroll LinkedIn. Face-to-face time matters, especially for the people who aren’t setting global strategy. That’s the workforce. That’s us.
McMillan doesn’t need to be in the office because his value isn’t measured by how often he sits in a cubicle. His job is about vision, strategy, and delivering results to the board and shareholders. Employees, on the other hand, need RTO because we deliver through teamwork, presence, and execution. Pretending otherwise is just entitlement disguised as “flexibility.”