After working from home for 2 years, my employer (big tech) is making me return to the office while the majority of my team is remote.
I'll pretty much be commuting to an empty cubicle. They're saying it has to be either medical or religious for them to make the accommodation at this point. I'm pretty sure that if I lived about 30 minutes further from the office, they wouldn't be making me come in. I know the rest of my team doesn't have 'medical' or 'religious' exemptions.
Employees had the opportunity to go through our return to office accommodations process and our medical accommodations process at the beginning of the return to office process. We were consistent in the way we analyzed all requests and made determinations on remote status changes based on the criteria set by the executive team at the time.
Our current process is that we will consider transitions from hybrid to remote status for employees who have a medical or religious accommodation. Outside of that, we are not approving remote status transitions at this time and are handling this consistently across the department.