And honestly? I actually have a lot of empathy, if not sympathy, for CIG's situation during that snow storm.
Allegedly, I am working with a remote worker who was worried about weather taking out power or worse recently. They expressed their concerns and I pushed that farther up the line because I was not authorized to really do anything. I also allegedly had some unofficial discussions that we would make up some bullshit work that they claimed to be doing while bailing out a basement because the sump pump failed or dealing with power outages or whatever so that we could pay them.
Fortunately it mostly wasn't an issue but I totally saw the decision that "if someone can't work they need to use PTO" because we had single digit people in that region. I would have, allegedly, done everything I could to help that employee but that wouldn't have been reflected in corporate policy.
THAT being said: This was not single digit remote workers. This was an actual office full of people and while I don't think Texas knew how bad that would be, they also knew shit was gonna be bad (honestly, even a light snow is bad in Texas but...). So if the managers of the Austin office weren't able to make this clear ahead of time (or, honestly, any remotely agile company not having a "Yo, don't worry about not being able to work because of a natural disaster. We have your back" policy...), then that is a MASSIVE failure of management at pretty much all levels.
Because it is good they eventually came to a good policy. That doesn't matter to all the stress for people who were trying to keep their families alive with no power in a blizzard who were worried about also losing a paycheck if they didn't have enough PTO saved up.
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