Workers who choose the path of least resistance may not speak up about barriers to work that they face for fear of conflict or apprehension to change.

Or because it's not their job to do that. Tech perpetuates this "entrepreneurial mindset" bullshit, saying that for the wage paid for your work, you are also responsible for the company as a whole. Fuck no, especially since most devs can't do shit about it. If you own a company and decide that I spend most of my productive time in bullshit meetings, you still pay me, just not for stuff you can actually sell. If the meetings start grinding my gears, I might hop over to a place where stuff makes more sense.

Workers are not there to make up for the bullshit management pulls. If your company is inefficient and mismanaged, look for the problem in management.

We’d like you to be “agile” by following these very specific and rigid set of rules and procedures.

When my company introduced the concept of "Agile Metrics" I knew the shit went off the rails.

The original "agile" is a reaction to the overly rigid planning and emphasizes worker self-management. It makes sense since the people who are closest to the work (the workers) know best how to plan and implement the work.

It immediately breaks down when a specialized management tier emerges and tries to push their own agenda, i.e. to sell themselves rather than do something meaningful.

At this point, whichever form is used doesn't matter. The management, endowed with the power from above, will exploit the weakness of any agile-shmagile methodology to push their own agenda.

It's time to break free from Corporate.

My experience is that a team should self-organize and decide how to work by trying things out and see what works well for them.

Anyone trying to force a framework down on people is wrong because different people/teams prefer working in different ways. I've never experienced following a framework rigidly as beneficial.

"Burndown charts."

Best cover for teams trying to look busy and justify their headcount.

This is too close to home.