Absolutely agree. This is how the email should look like:
"Hi Everyone,
Starting next week if you want to work from home you must send an explanatory writeup to your manager who will decide whether to allow it."
On a tangential issue: I hate when people sign their emails (especially internal ones) when there's a perfectly serviceable from field. If you have to then please be thoughtful and use the -- signature convention.
Neither of the given examples were a search for alternative solutions to the problem. If you're after suggestions, that's cool - but when you're giving orders, call them orders.
The title of the article was "...Kill Company Culture", not "...Demonstrate that the Company is Dead".
If the CEO (or the intervening levels of company) are not open for discussion, the choice of email really doesn't matter. If they are, and the terse, uncommunicative, fiat email is sent out inadvertently, then that email is damaging.
It's conventional to sign letters even though it's also conventional to put one's name and address on the top of e letter, especially business letters, and on the envelope.
It's also conventional to use people's names when talking to them even both speaker and subject know who they are.
"Hi Everyone,
Starting next week if you want to work from home you must send an explanatory writeup to your manager who will decide whether to allow it."
On a tangential issue: I hate when people sign their emails (especially internal ones) when there's a perfectly serviceable from field. If you have to then please be thoughtful and use the -- signature convention.