>Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.
But you are still using the same word that I was getting tripped up on. Either the return to the office is optional or it is mandated. It can't be both.
It's team and role dependent, so it pretty much is "both" at the company level.
This seems win-win to me. Teams and orgs that consider remote-friendliness important can operate that way, while teams and orgs that don't think that can keep the team colocated. Ultimately, it means the vast majority of people's preferences are accommodated. Worst case, changing teams at Google is very smooth.
If it were truly "optional" for everyone even without manager approval, that's effectively "remote" because some people not being present means the team works in a largely remote fashion, and it also means space planning for expensive offices is very hard and result in office layouts that are not as productive.
For a big company with 100k+ employees, this seems like a good call IMO because it allows all working models to co-exist, and it can easily be tweaked after seeing how RTO goes.
The decision to work as remote-first or office-first is, as I understand it, much more broadly available than it was. You are given the option to go remote-first and not return to the office at all. Returning to the office is optional.
If you choose to go office-first, then you will be expected to actually be at the office. In that sense, return to the office is mandatory.
The only thing that's really happening is them saying "you need to commit to one approach or the other, and act accordingly". This is understandable, you need to plan office capacity and other such practical considerations
The fact that the policy is company wide certainly lends more pressure towards returning to the office. That being said something can be mandated but poorly enforced. In the Google case, it appears that the enforcement is tuned down by an (apparently) usable exception mechanism. One can infer based on this, that in the language of the article, the new policy is somewhere between “mandated” and “optional”. With all due respect, I think you are being overly pedantic.
But you are still using the same word that I was getting tripped up on. Either the return to the office is optional or it is mandated. It can't be both.