why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

They're wasting money on big buildings and rent.

Also, they want control of your activity while your on the clock. It bothers them if you're more productive, get the same amount of work done but can relax more at home. Which is the way it should be. If I can do the same work in 4 hours than I can in 8, I should get paid the same, and be able to relax, instead of being made to stay at work for 8hrs and be given even more things to do to just stay busy.

I am surprised they don't just cut costs by not having a physical location then? Or is this just while waiting out lease agreements.
- Some smaller companies are doing this. It makes them more agile financially and actually helps their growth to not have a building to pay for. I don’t understand the larger companies.
- Plenty are, it's just that the largest companies built those places, they cannot trivially liquidate them. Plus they usually own the whole land, so cutting part of it away is not easy.
  
  They still should. For many jobs office work is a completely unnecessary waste of:
  
  Productivity (via constant distractions)
  
  Time (commuting)
  
  Money (via the building maintenance costs)
  
  Space (the actual building)
  
  Resources (heating and shit)
  
  But managers are loathe to ever admit any failings, our market culture frowns upon this. Hence admitting that your building is no longer needed is not a thing any manager to wants to bring up in a meeting to their bosses, so back to the office it is. :<
- Correct. They either own the buildings and have to pay for upkeep (and can't get rid of them) or they're on a long term lease.
- My employer spent tens of millions having several custom buildings built over a decade ago. They house our servers as well. The only way they could get rid of their buildings is to get new buildings for the servers. That's a pretty tough sell.
- A friend works for a housing association that had a very fancy office and that's now been sold as they are all working from home.
- Another reason you've not yet been given is that some of these companies have decades long contracts for renting. The government should intervene and cancel the contracts and pay for them to be converted to flats tbqh. Someone will say "But that will cost more than building a new one![citation needed]" but knocking down half the office buildings at once will probably give everyone in the cities supercancer*[citation needed]*
I’ve never understood the empty buildings argument. Wouldn’t the company be “wasting” just as much money if the building was empty or full? Might even cost more to have it occupied since then you need hvac.
- No, if the building was empty, they should get rid of it. But there’s the whole sunk cost thing if they built it themselves or are in a multi year lease
Not just rent, they own those big buildings. They're assets, and what happens when everyone realizes they don't need those buildings at the same time? Corporate real estate crashes and those assets are worthless. Nobody wants a huge asset dropping off their balance sheet because they let their employees wfh before they could offload their offices.

The shitty middle management who think like your second point are convenient, but I don't think they're the ones making the decision to call employees back in a lot of cases.
That does not make sense at all if you consider the number one priority of any company: money. If they make just as much or even more when people work more efficiently they would not care.

First, a lot of studies have shown the productivity boost for WFH may not be uniform or actually exist. Whether the possible productivity boost is worth the money on office space hasn't been answered, it is likely more in that gray area than WFH proponents want it to be.

Second, while generic work productivity is about the same level, teaching new skills isn't. We have data showing educating from home has been worse for students, and that seems to be filtering into the office place. Junior staff aren't picking up skills fast enough and are probably a major reason why WFH productivity measures are lower than expected. It isn't because new staff are lazy, just that they have fewer people to ask questions to and don't ask as many questions in general.

Third, building and maintaining a work network has fallen apart. People don't know others in an office, which can be a problem in flat company structures where communication is not expected to go through the boss only. So you have people who feel like they are doing productive work, but aren't talking to others. This can cause a lot of rework that the managers see in slipping deadlines.

That said, the answer seems to be hybrid for these jobs as workers won't tolerate full time in the office anymore. However, hybrid has been a clusterfuck in a lot of companies because the hybrid model is new and not everyone knows how to manage to it.

I just wanted to say that this is pretty much the most well thought out answer on WFH I've seen. It's nuanced and balanced.

Thank you.
- You're welcome.
  
  As you can see from some of the replies, there is the assumption that bosses and executives are evil and trying to make the worker's lives worse, but I don't see that in a lot of these discussions.
  
  I can also see how some staff may see themselves as being more productive yet their managers may see less productivity within their department overall.
To speak to your points, I started with about 1 year ago in a new career in IT. We initially were coming in one day a week and this has moved to two days.

First, when we moved to two days, I have it about 6 weeks, then started crunching numbers. By the sole metric of closing tickets... My team as a whole is more productive in the office. I didn't break down exactly who was more of less productive, but I have my ideas. I'm willing to bet that I work better at home, but it's a moot point as the team is better on site.

As far as learning new skills, even at one day a week, I've caught up to the rest of my team and have surpassed them technically. Again, it's IT and I've always had a strong interest, whereas I see some of the team probably view it as "just work" I'm actually enjoying the work. Again, it's a second career so maybe maturity is in play here too, but even the younger guys who were hired after me are growing very quickly.

You're absolutely right about networking. I felt so isolated when I started. It wasn't until I learned a few people a few steps above where I was that I learned who is a good resource, and who I can trust. Once I got my head around that, I think people actually see the work in doing and redirect me for it. If I were 100% wfh I don't think I would be having as good a time.

Just my experience
- Did you have any relevant experience or credentials? I'm looking to jump to a new career possibly in IT, but I have absolutely nothing on paper to sell myself with. The most I have is a few years experience in diagnostics as I was once a refrigeration tech.
Thanks for helping bring this perspective to light. Most threads on work from home go all in on productivity being higher, but don't take into account the longer term consequences of working from home on knowledge sharing, education, training, and team building. Even if productivity is higher now, that doesn't mean it will remain that way in the long run.
Great summary, I wish all the WFH fanatics would read and understand this. I really hate how in most online spaces they make it seem like 100% WFH is the answer for everything.
while generic work productivity is about the same level, teaching new skills isn't.

As someone who did his last year of college and first two years of career from home this is spot on. My senior simply refused to teach me anything, or even answering my chats and my manager didn't care. I had to learn doing inverse engineering on the excel files because I cannot even sit at his side and saw him work ans learn. I changed companies a month ago to a full-time in office position and I'm learning more in this month that what I did on the past two years (its also helps that my new manager is also a college professor and have like 40 years of industry experience).
Your comment reflects what my own experience has been over the past few years.
Thanks for your answer, you bring some great points. I'm wondering how stable hybrid is; while it does alleviate the issue with training/knowledge sharing and networking, it also looks like a compromise choice that still requires companies to pay in full for a half-empty office.

Either over time "hybrid" companies plan to reduce their office footprint by half (but then have empty days and "overbooked" ones, making the "in-office" part of the experience potentially even worse) or they are just hoping to create some critical mass in the office that will eventually pull most of the other employees there.

WFH works better when most people are at home or otherwise distributed (eg small groups from different offices). If you're the only one calling into a meeting room where everyone else is sitting in person, it tends to suck.

Same for being in-office. It's productive if all the people you need to talk to are also in, on the day you go. Otherwise you just commuted 1 hour or more to have the same zoom calls in a noisier environment.

So I feel like there must be some sort of "gravitational" pull where it gets more convenient to be at home/in the office based on how many people are making the same choice.

Here's the fun part:

When execs were hyper focused on outsourcing, not once did they say productivity was a problem

Second local workers wanted to do the same though, suddenly if you're not in the office you're useless.

Which is it? Outsourcing is trash or WFH is just fine?

They outsourced because they could pay their employees less.

Some companies attempted to pay workers who moved to areas with cheaper cost of living, but that failed. My guess is that full remote companies are going to shift wages so that they are closer to the national average than the region.
- I know why they did it
  
  It's just a dumb argument when it wasn't one before

A comment I've seen a few times is that remote work highlights the minimal value that middle-managers provide to companies.

If you're employees work from home with little interaction with their managers and they do it well/better, then why have those managers? Like you said, companies want to be cost effective. So the push back to the office could be coming from managers who don't want a light shined on their lack of value.

Ironically that probably ousts out their minimal value harder. Not a good look forcing your "underlings" if productivity was good prior, and subsequently falls flat.
Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America

Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.

So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.

But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.

Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.

Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.

I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources

But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).

Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem

The people in the boards of directors, the major investors, people who run large investment funds etc. are the same or very close to the owners of commercial real estate.

They don’t want to fuck themselves.

Also many times corporate rent is used as money laundering, to hide profits etc. Like the building is owned by company A, which is incorporated in the Virgin Islands, but is actually owned by the same group that owns company B that rents the building. So they pay money to themselves. So company B is not profitable and doesn’t have to pay taxes. Presto pronto.

Just a very obvious manoeuvre, there are certainly many more.

Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.

the businesses that own the office real estate
car manufacturers
tire manufacturers
petroleum companies
coffee franchises
fast food franchises lining freeways on the way to work

And most importantly, funds invested in all of the above.

People who own businesses also own stocks in other people's businesses. Meaning they all fall and rise together. Trying to keep the "work commute" and "office rental" industries alive is just an attempt on the part of those who hold capital to keep their portfolios growing.

In secret, they are probably also trying to hedge their bets, diversify and make themselves immune to the coming collapse. They'll try to position themselves and their capital in such a way so that the working class is the only group hurt when it happens.

But in public? They are not going to devalue their assets by standing by, complacent, as an office apocalypse approaches.

I think what they don't realize is that it's basically Pandora's box at this point, and what's been let out is a ticking time bomb. Unless something changes, remote work will always be on the cards now and will probably always be preferable.
- Maybe they're focused on playing for time so they can insure their assets and move to hedge funds that are shorting all of the above industries? I don't know investing that well.
Yup. A lot of companies benefiting off the inefficiency of commuting.
I really feel like this makes the most sense. It beats out all the other arguments.

Middle managers need more control? Big bosses never care that much about what middle managers say, why now? And across tons of companies? Seems silly. Middle managers are notoriously ineffective.

They want to retain control/keep you tired? Maybe, but it would take a large conspiracy coordinated between the execs, which seems like a stretch. There would need to be a massive Illuminati-esque organization like that Stonecutters episode from The Simpsons.

But as always, it comes back to "follow the money." The people making the decision will lose money somehow, so they are trying not to lose, or to minimize losses. All board of directors people have multiple investments and interests, so of course they are trying to make the best of their situation. They own part of the IT company renting the space, but also have investment in office retail space and some local businesses. If the office life drives an area to stay alive, its dying will shift the money away from all their investments. As usual, they are making those decisions without giving a shit about anything but money and their own interests.

On the subject of remote working being more productive or not, my anedoctal experience is that when remote working is fully embraced, the productivity skyrockets, but when it is embraced half-way it may have a negative effect.

When 2/3 of the employees are in an office, they tend to reach out to one another to discuss things and remote workers often get out of the loop. When everyone is working remotely, these discussions happen on slack channels for everyone to see. And if they are written down in a channel, folks can read it as many times as they need to ensure nothing was missed.

This may seem not to be too important, but it makes a massive difference at the end of the day. And you could try to make that happen without remote working but people will not stop walking out to someone else's cubicle for small questions when they have that option.

This is definitely a good point, when everyone is wfh things like slack or (bleh) Teams has everything in it. I am an internet kid and used im to communicate with my friend base for a long time, it works for me and I can stay connected with people that way, it seems like some people aren't able to utilize that effectively.

I work for a large Corp that has offices in several location, prior to covid wfh, information was often silo'd just to certain locations and there were people on teams I didn't know because they never post in slack/teams and instead just do everything in person. All of a sudden I'm seeing them post and ask questions/comment when they rarely/never had before.

The company is now instituting RTO and claiming it's in the name of collaboration and culture, but if anything I think wfh helped a lot to make cross-site collaboration and culture more prevalent.
Yeah, our company had hybrid available to everyone, so going remote was simply increasing the hybrid days to 100%. Our productivity skyrocketed because instead of having to waste 5-10 minutes per hour walking across a stupidly huge campus, or battling people for meeting rooms, we could just meet in virtual rooms, and instantly "teleport" to the next one. We had no commute, people would meet early or late, or during lunch.

Nobody asked us to work more but we did because we COULD. We were already fully aligned on hitting our goals, and being in the office was an obstacle rather than an aid. We're increasing our in-office days over the overwhelmingly negative feedback (why even ask for input if you're just going to ignore it?). I'll just have to mentally pull back on available bandwidth for the time wasted on in-office days, reject more meetings, and extend deadlines accordingly. I'll need to free up all that extra time for the small talk and "networking" they want me to do instead of working.
Thanks I agree. Pre COVID, my company closed some very small offices to only keep a few HQs and a handful of people were offered fully remote contracts. They were generally very unhappy, being basically cut off from training, career growth, most of the context around work discussions, company events...

WFH is great when working from home is the norm for everyone. The office ALSO works only when most colleagues are in the office (otherwise you just add commute time to the same zoom call you could have from home).

My theory is they're attempting to keep real estate values high.

This is the truth. Or someone is and those someone's are putting pressure on bosses who are amenable to it anyway because they like control/lack empathy for employees/etc
- Or someone is and those someone’s are putting pressure on ~~bosses~~ media
  
  Bosses are convinced by articles in mass media that this needs to happen. For real estate.
  
  There are a bunch of new buildings in my city that have apartments with retail space on the ground level. All the retail spaces are empty, never used. I live in one. Someone is taking a bath on all the losses on these investments.
- I think the "someone" putting pressure on them isn't really individual people but just a general sense of class solidarity. Upper middle class and upper class people will do anything to keep their avenues of profit healthy, and their avenues are the status quo. Giving lower level workers more autonomy, flexibility, and the power to shape what the workplace looks like is NOT the status quo. Add the effect that WFH would have on the real estate market to the mix and now they REALLY aren't going to be interested. Real Estate is a huge money maker AND has strong influence in many other industries. None of this should really matter to us regular folks though. We need to stop thinking that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If workers want to work from home, we should continue to push for it. Our metrics for what is beneficial to workplaces should be very different from theirs because their goals are very different from ours.
  
  I am on a hybrid schedule and I love it. If they allowed it, I'd probably be at 80% remote because my job, experience, and skillset allows it. It's beneficial to me, opens up space in our building, reduces my travel cost, reduces traffic at rush hour, and I GET MORE DONE! No losers as far as I am concerned. :)
Who is trying to keep Real-estate values high? The companies renting space? Why would they?

Managers tend to be people people. One of my better bosses believed in "Management by Walking Around". He'd show up a couple times a day to see "if we needed anything" and to keep track of what going on.

When workers are remote, managers don't get the frequent imformal reassurance that work is going smoothly. They feel out of touch and uneasy. Some workplaces have a culture amenable to remote work & some don't. My current job is hybrid. Some come in 1 or 2 days a week. I come in 3 or 4 days. My family can be distracting.

There are apparently some industries where there's less production at home, I work in an industry where this isn't the case though and it seems to be extrovert admin people pushing it, I think they think we're all sad and lonely at home?

"It's nice to come in and have people to talk to!"

Is it? Or are we all just being dragged in because you want chats?

Talking to people isn't really boosting my productivity. I need peace and time to think. The office is the last of all places where I can find that.
- Talking to others may not boost your productivity working, but it can give you a better understanding of what to do when you are productive.
- Absolutely, we have whatsapp groups now so if I have a question I can fire it over to anyone or everyone if needed, it's so much easier and I can ignore it until convenient.
Don’t forget all the people that hate their kids (and “family”) too. That was one of the biggest driving forces at the immediate end of the pandemic lockdowns. Then they changed course and said it was about productivity because hating your kids sounds bad.
If you’re going in to talk to people it means you’re not working. Unless… the company pays you just to talk to people. 🤷‍♂️
- And how does that make you feel?
  
  On a serious note though people who I didn't like and didn't want to talk to would come by my desk daily and spend a minimum of 20 minutes just talking about shit I didn't care about. How they got any work at all done is beyond me because obviously they were doing the rounds and talking to everyone else too. And how I got any work done between the million visits? I hated being in an office. I was so miserable.
I kind of agree that remote working every single day gets very socially deprived very quickly. Although the office isn’t a place for socialising, not having anyone to talk to day in day out at work drives me a bit mad.

But I also think 90% of the time, working from home is better. Maybe a hybrid model where you only go to the office once or maximum twice a week or something could work for most people. The introverts and the extroverts reaching a compromise.
- Or, just make it free choice? If you miss socialising then go in, if you don't then stay home?

I work 95% remote, and I'll be the first to admit, there is value in working physically close to your teammates. Discussion and camaraderie can happen organically, which allows people to better understand each others' strengths. There are also fewer things to distract you, and the reality is that many people these days are experiencing a sort of internet-induced ADHD, so being in an office can make it easier to concentrate. All of this allows you to be and feel more productive.

That's the best argument I've got, but I wouldn't mandate it on anyone. The only people mandating working from office are people who are insecure with their workforce and hiring methodologies. They don't trust their workers to do the job, so they feel the need to micromanage their workers like children. If you're a manager, and you don't feel like you can trust your employees, you've already lost.

I actually have ADHD and the opposite is true for me. Working from home I can concentrate without distractions of office workers walking by, or talking about something that I'm not interested in but can't block out. I work in my office at home with the door closed for practically the whole day and it's great. My work has it's own built in structure, but I imagine that other kinds of less structured work could be very difficult for someone with ADHD.
I can tell you from experience, there is nothing more distracting than having your manager walk up behind you and tap you on the shoulder while you're working on code. While this problem doesn't go away completely with remote work, at least you have time to compose yourself and bookmark your work before you respond
- I haven't had a manager that makes a habit out of that, that's a no no. If someone is in the zone, you don't mess with em. We did have Do Not Disturb signs we could put up, but I never felt the need.
Also for me there is value in occasionally seeing people in person. The exact ratio will depend on the job, but for me it would be about 2-3 days per month in the office. We see each other, talk about how things are going, blockers, stuff we need to change, a little office gossip and then off we go again.

In that sense, a lax hybrid schedule works best for me personally. However, for it to work, everyone should agree to be in the office in the same days. Coming to an empty office and doing the same zoom calls you could have done from home is less than useful.

And since, again, the ratio of individual work Vs collaborative work varies by person and team, we'd need to find an average that sort of works for everyone and agree on a common schedule That is where I think the idea of hybrid comes in: 2 or 3 days per week in the office for everyone. My company is trying this and asking (but for now not forcing) people to concentrate attendance in the days in the middle of the week.

This clearly works better for some and worse for others.

I heard from a colleague that some companies are trying a different model. They shut down the offices and used part of the savings as budget for managers to create more frequent team events, so teams can e.g. meet in person at a restaurant a couple of times per month. I have no idea who these companies are and how this approach is going.
I think it should be on a case-by-case basis. I'm in the legal field, and there's definitely days I don't need to be in the office as almost all of our work is online now. State and federal mandatory efiling, e-discovery is online, and even our document management system is headed to the cloud, so no need for remoting in, just log into Microsoft 365 from any browser. Don't even need to own any Microsoft apps natively anymore.

On the other hand, there are days that I do need to be in the office: depositions and prepping witnesses, trial preparedness, and sometimes, you just need to touch base with everyone to see how things are going. I work in securities litigation, and those are frequently very complex, document and fact intensive cases.

We have a entire practices that are 100% remote now. The partners are either elderly, or they live far away from the office and were hybrid remote before the pandemic. The paralegal that works with those attorneys is also 100% remote.

Lastly, I am much more productive at home than in the office. I do not have ADHD, and do not have a problem with attention, and do not get distracted easily. On the other hand, I'm an introvert, and really loathe the interpersonal nonsense and constant interruptions of ppl barging into my office, more often enough that just to chat. Last month, I had to do a major document review of going through 10s of thousands of emails, and to just plow through that at home, comfy in my bed, where my bathroom is just a few steps away, made me so much more productive than being stuck in the office.

why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

Managers generally don't know how to manage people, so point fingers at WFH (or anything else that's handy)

Managers are managers because they're good at playing power games, not because they're competent at their jobs. Power games are much harder if you never see the people you manage. Managing in a predominantly WFH environment will be very different and a lot of people who are successful now will fail in this world. That's what they're scared of.
- I read some research paper not too long ago that showed how a majority of managers promoted from within are bad at their jobs because they got all their experience in other jobs along the way to management that are not even remotely similar to the tasks required for management, thus they don't actually develop skills that make for good managers.
  
  Like just because you flipped burgers really good at McDonald's doesn't mean you would be good at managing other burger flippers.
- Ive not had many managers in my working life with actual people skills...
Top executives and board members, maybe, as they don't even have to spend time in the office themselves. But line managers are people too, they have families and go through the same commute I do.

My manager looked every bit as miserable as the team when forced in the office (but he also had to defend the company line to us and talk about how "energized" he felt being all together in person....).

It comes with his biggerl salary, so I'm not saying I feel too sorry for him... It's just that I don't think he and his peers are the ones pushing against WFH, at least in my company
I think there was literally a management consultant quoted on CBC that said most managers rely on time in office as their only measure of productivity.

Humanity has done many atrocities, but that's somehow just as disappointing if true. Like, measuring and increasing productivity is the entire point of that job, isn't it?

Because a bigger company did it.

You'd think there'd be abetter reason but the corporate world is surprisingly uncreative. Signed: Someone who saw trillions being burned by IBM's Wattson despite a sea of red flags.

Last year a company I wowed at the first interview didn't follow up. When I asked why, they said that since Facebook was slowing hiring, they were too.

They're not even related businesses other than both broadly being tech companies.
- Almost sounds like they're going out of their way to directly compete with Facebook for talent.

A lot of large companies and executives have investments in real estate. If everyone stopped using offices all of a sudden, they would lost a bunch of money because the space wouldn't be in demand anymore.

I think you're attributing far more coordination to these guys than they're actually capable of.
- What I've learned from following cryptocurrencies is that people don't need intentional coordination to be affected by the reality-distorting bias of their investments. If someone has bought a narrative about why the thing they invested in has value, when faced with evidence that this narrative may actually be wrong, most of them aren't going to be sophisticated enough to think "Well that's a strong argument, I guess it would be in my interest to pretend that it's false while privately defecting". Instead they are going to want to dismiss it outright, shit-talk everyone disagreeing, and throw more money/time/effort in the hole. Being financially invested in something messes with your emotions like that.
  
  Basically I think that being invested in commercial real estate is likely to make someone actually believe any ideas that imply that commercial real estate has value, even if they are bullshit.
- There doesn't have to be coordination if there's incentives.
  
  It's like how so many people who drive cars act in ways that benefit cars and is counterproductive for those who don't drive. They want plentiful free parking, lots of lanes, and cheap gasoline. They're not particularly coordinated. They're just incentivized because of their position. They benefit from those kinda things, so gravitate towards them (and also don't oppose them).
- I don't think there's some shadowy Illuminati organisation behind it. They are pretty blatent when they manipulate things.
  
  That said, I do think there are a lot of investors and analysts that have come to the same conclusion and are talking to each other and passing info to their clients.

It's easy, a lot of companies have board members who are also board members in office space companies.

Imaginary feeling of loss of control.

There are a few reasons.

The people who own the buildings are going bankrupt and so to help out their rich friends CEOs are trying to force people into using office buildings.
Companies don't want to let go of their power over an employee.
They don't trust their employees.
They can't watch their employees.

2,3,4 sure but I don't think 1 is plausible
- 1 is plausible.
  
  Remember the super rich have bank friends.
  
  Ever heard of "If you owe the bank $100 it's your problem. If you owe them $1mil it's their problem"
  
  A giant building that's empty that nobody pays rent on is a huge bill to settle somehow with the bank.

Managers find it easier to micromanage their employees when they are at the office.

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They took the risks, in hopes of higher rewards. They want the rewards without the risk.
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit

Yeah..well no. Companies are run by managers who aren't necessarily rational about human resources.

The answer that is common but I don't see here is it's a soft layoff result. It allows the company to reduce their employee spend because a percentage of them will resign without the publicity of doing a layoff.

Without internal intelligence I feel like that's what zoom is doing for example.

I honestly think this might be pretty close to the mark. My company just announced RTO today but interestingly was pro WFH even before Covid with many of their staff hired as remote workers. They recently had to lay off a number of people and aren't projecting to be making their numbers this quarter. So I do wonder if this is an attempt to shed more staff without taking active action to lay off more people and the moral hit that comes with that.
- Those are all typical signs of doing a soft layoff is exactly what they're doing. Not an uncommon tactic and it's been popular for decades because it works.
  
  I first saw it in the early 2000s when the company I worked at expected everyone to work out of the Denver corporate office. Many refused to make the move and resigned, a few years later we swapped back and reduced the size of the office so nobody but Sr VPs even had a dedicated space in the office and folks moved as far away as Central America to work from again.

Control.

I suspect they were ‘advised’ by the Banks and perhaps the government, to put the brakes on.

Every Corporation would be delighted to dump expensive city real estate, and “externalise facilities costs” to the workforce. ( which is what working from home is, from a balance sheet point of view). It’s what they teach at business school.

However, it would only take a handful of big players to to do this in succession to collapse the real estate market in most cities.

The knock on effect would likely include some large defaults by landlords and developers and who knows where that ends.

A secondary effect is house prices. certainly in London, where people pay a 2-5x premium to live within an hour of they high paying job.

If people no longer need to live near the office, why would they spend so much on crappy housing ? It would likely trigger an exodus away from the capital, collapsing the housing market.

In the UK if the housing market collapses, the economy follows it down the tube in massive way.

Hence the half hearted ‘push’ to get people back in the office .

When my previous employer announced RTO they literally sent us an infographic explaining why they chose their "hubs" and Denver was "$7 million in tax breaks". It's a multi billion dollar company but 7 million dollars is 7 million dollars, I guess. I don't think they even had a major office there before, they were opening one.
- Thanks, that's a very good point! A physical office is a great bargaining chip for a large company. I remember a few years back when several cities and states engaged ina kind of auction to host the next Amazon HQ. It probably also works at the international level, where I imagine it will be easier to enter a market (from the perspective of local laws and permits) and sell your product there if you also open an office and create thousands of new jobs there.
It's not just real estate. We've already seen over the pandemic the collapse of some businesses that depend on office workers. Many of the places I used to hit for lunch are gone now.
- And by sending people back to the office it's the business outside downtown that are suffering instead.
  
  Decentralize businesses!
Thanks. I can see this happening for very large companies that do active lobbying and have to be closer to the government. This might explain Amazon, for instance. I read they are pushing hard for workers to be in office although as a business they should not be otherwise impacted negatively if everyone else was WFH.

Some companies might also fear the impact of this knock on effect you're describing. Either directly, like travel agencies who specialize in business travel or indirectly because of the general turbulence in the economy.

I think you are right. I had originally underestimated this because I couldn't imagine a company looking at the cost of their big office in a premium location in London and going "nah, I can't close it, it's for the greater good!".

But the knock on effect could be a more existential threat for a company.

As an anecdote, I work at a midsized software company as a product manager. I have an international team of about 20 that I manage from home (full-time remote). Overall there is some loss of speed and agility versus having a full-time in-office staff. I'm not a fan of trying to quantify productivity per se, but for things like estimations and deviations there's no question that in my environment at least, things move a little slower and take a little longer. Now personally, the fact that we can hire engineers anywhere across the globe (including in LCOL areas), don't have to pay rent and related fees, and that some of the best engineers specifically want full-time remote more than outweighs the reduced agility (putting aside all of the other potential QOL benefits) -- and if needed, some of the savings from reduced rent and salaries could be used to expand the team anyway. Thankfully my management team agrees and has continued to pursue a remote/hybrid environment. But for those places that value speed and agility most it could be a bit of a problem.

I've been helping a Chinese company and it includes getting on the phone at 9am to talk to them right as they're leaving the office. For an international team there can be time zone issues like that, but if you can find overlap between Europe and China then you can find overlap between anywhere

My work place doubled down on work from home and they allow work from anywhere. They still encourage to gather at the workplace sometimes for socialization and general good vibes.

A couple of extra ones to add to the list:

"Work you don't see didn't happen"

I think a lot of it is down to the assumption that employees are working less because less work is seen.

"A tired employee is a loyal employee"

That one might sound dystopian, but it's also true. Commutes make people feel worse, and contribute to burned out feelings by reducing recuperation time. People in that kind of space are unable to look for new opportunities as easily.

I am on team work from home personally, but the reality is we will have to compromise a bit, and I think a hybrid environment is where the sweet spot is. I still work remote about 90% of the time, but realistically I think 60-80% remote, 20-40% in office is ideal and tenable for just about every work type where remote work is feasible.

There is benefit to being in person with your colleagues, there is benefit to having a centralized area for congregating, meeting with outside stakeholders, etc. However, there is absolutely no reason to be in the office all day every day. It makes no sense. The bulk of employees spend AT LEAST 50% (rank and file probably closer to 85-90%?) of their time working alone, by themselves. Let them do that wherever the fuck they want. If the work is getting done, leave them the fuck alone and let them work in their PJs or on their couch or whatever.

A hybrid environment also keeps your work force local and prevents us all from being outsourced. If we all insist on working remote full time then there is absolutely no reason for employers not to offer our jobs to someone living somewhere that's cheaper to live. Sure, we could correct over time and move to a lower cost of living place to compete, but is that really what you want? Do you want to leave your home, friends, family, etc just to chase the job you already have solely because they won't pay you what they already do to stay where you are? If you own a home do you want the value to tank as demand plummets? If your rent is cheap do you want it to skyrocket because displaced remote workers are flooding your town in a rush to capitalize?

I would agree with most of what you said.

There are also a not-insignifigant number of people that struggle when at home 100%. Some people are rock stars and able to just get stuff done. But a lot of people are not, sadly, organized enough to handle such an unstructured environment and able to still be effective.

This isnt a new thing due to covid or the move, but a LOT of folks just do better with a hard separation of work/life and a lot of folks arent self aware enough to know they need it.

As someone that can and has worked remote, and chooses to come back, it can be frustrating working with people that struggle with these things, and I definitely see differences between home work and office work in some. I actually work in an office because its much easier to maintain balance. I tend to work too much from home and it causes burnout but I also have kids/family that come home early and dont really understand that just because im home doesnt mean i can sit down and talk at their convenience. What I mean is that work/life balanace is harder. So i choose to commute 99% of the time and can WFH when needed.

But i have one guy that had had this issue chronically for years where he often struggles to communicate, is easily distracted, often needed to be micro managed or have his tasks organized, prioritized and in some cases, even steps spelled out. He does well enough to mostly be of help (so hes not gonna get fired), but he complains about lack of upward mobility or lack of raises, but when the SHTF, hes always got excuses locked and loaded about why hes behind or cant complete a project/task.

Conversely I have a guy thats AMAZING from wherever. Never has issues and is always way ahead of the curve. Hes also full time remote but excels at it.

It just depends on the person in a lot of cases and frankly, in my very small use cases, many/most arent the type that are capable of the self discipline needed for the task. Now that said Im not at google or one of those places that hires rockstars in buckets, so they reasons they are RTO are likely different from my orgs.

Of my team, i would say at least a cool 60% are just much less....themselves from home and easily distracted. Either because they segment their life (which is fine and awesome, i do that too), or because they dont have a good setup at home, or because they are just too easily distracted at home.
For me Hybrid is a good compromise too from a work-life balance perspective (and job security too, now that you made me think of outsourcing....)

However, it tends to result in focusing in-office days on the "social", meetings-heavy part of my job, so it's challenging for the management of office space. I want to be in the office in the same days as my team (but hopefully not in the same days when some other larger team are also in and using all the meeting rooms).

For now this isn't much of an issue in practice, but just because my company still pays for a full office that is on average only less than half full (even when meeting rooms are full, there is still plenty of space to talk). However, I don't know how long they'll want to keep doing it if hybrid becomes the permanent arrangement.

I see some smaller companies started switching to temporary, WeWork-style office spaces, with no permanent desks. So you need to reserve your desk and meeting rooms in advance on the days you're planning to be in. I don't know how that works in larger companies where your whole team wants to be in or WFH at the same time, though...

I am no exoert

But i have read of 2 reasons.

1: the boss thinks people who sit at home, are lazy and get nothing done. When they are in the office he can keep an eye on them!

2: nobody using their expensive office buildings means waste of rent money. Not wanting to let that go to waste... makes sense. Inviting potential clients to your empty offices would also seem awkward.

Im sure there could be more reasons..

Sunk cost fallacy of big offices.

Found out today that some executives are afraid of leaks and digital records of certain conversations that could happen in person instead.

That's probably it, having every interaction possibly logged/recorded by the employees is pretty bad for a lot of bosses/managers.
That could be a consideration, yes. Funny enough, our whole Legal team has been consistently the one with the LEAST attendance in person in the office.... Overall it seems like forcing your call center employees in office because you're afraid they'll leak strategic company secrets is a bit of an over-reaction. I doubt that the most high-level, secret discussions on mergers and acquisitions or mass layoffs have ever happened in our office to begin with.
That makes a lot of sense. But I wish "So we can cover up our bullshit easier." wasn't a reason for it.

To verify you're spending every minute on actually working

Remote work threatens the status quo.

What status quo are we talking about? Sorry, my English sucks...
- One of the ways big, established companies look at change is this: "will this change make it easier or harder for new competitors to enter our market and take some of our business?". Depending on the answer, big players will ask for that change or will oppose it (and try to maintain the "status quo", I.e. things the way they already are).
  
  In other words, what is called the "barrier to entry" for new competitors must be as high as possible.
  
  For instance, when OpenAI's CEO started giving interviews on how dangerous AI like their own ChatGPT is and calling for more regulations, they are probably doing it to make it more difficult for new AI companies to enter the market and close the gap with them.
  
  So, with that in mind, how would a big company view WFH? if a company already owns an office that they can't easily take off of their balance sheets and remote working can now be an effective, cheaper alternative, then a new competitor could enter the market and do what your company does at a cheaper cost (not having the office cost). WFH is a chamge that lowers the barrier to entry, so big companies will tend to oppose it (or at least delay it)
- I think they are referring to making employees miserable. Remote work has been very beneficial for employees. More time with family, more flexibility, and you don't have a manager breathing down your neck constantly. So employers want the control back.
  
  Then there is also political pressure from local governments who are feeling the pinch from reduced taxes in their districts. Got to bring people back to the office so they spend money in the district.
- Well, something like this.
- Status quo is latin, so you're good

Two basic reasons:

Middle managers rate themselves (and others) by how many direct reports they have and it's harder to keep score when you don't see people in person.
Companies have spent billions on office space they can't easily get out of. Look at Apple:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Park

$5 billion dollars. They are deep in the sunk cost fallacy.

Reaction?

https://fortune.com/2023/03/24/remote-work-3-days-apple-discipline-terminates-tracks-tim-cook/

Companies that overhired the last few years might just wanna increase the attrition rates without explicitly saying so.

That could be a driver, yes. The problem is that the first people to go are usually the ones companies want to keep, either because they are star performers or because the job market requires their specific skills more (so they find something else easily and their roles are also harder to fill again).

But yes, I can see how a company might be more or less lenient applying their return to office policies, so that attrition is concentrated more in some teams. And firing people does have side-effects too on PR and morale of the remaining employees.

I do generally see more people leaving my company than new hires, though, so you might be on to something with the attrition rates...
- I would say the first people to go while switching to WFO will always be the first people to go when there is any chance of job hopping. The company is just accelerating that while forcing WFO.

It’s always good to step back from “companies” and think of companies as just a bunch of people.

Is it good for companies to force employees back to the office? Nah, probably not. Is it good for the guy who has to explain why he signed a 10-year lease on all that office space, and now it’s sitting empty? Yup. Is it good for the lonely manager who wants to be surrounded by people, and has the power to make that happen? Yup. Is it good for the exec who has to find some reason why his department is underperforming, and decides remote work is a good scapegoat? Ehhh….

Control, plain and simple. I am a software engineer, could work 100% remote, but damn if they don't want me in the office for some bs meeting or something. Also, fuck reddit.

Relevant Article 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces’ -- CNBC

Thanks for the article, interesting read!

“Many companies are realizing they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives’ opinions rather ~~than employee~~ data,” Larry Gadea, Envoy’s CEO and founder, tells CNBC Make It.

Yeah, business as usual (added the ~~strike~~)

Like people said, a lot of companies have stake in real estate.

WeWorks, for example, was supposed to be big IPO and big payouts for these companies. And because of WFH, WeWorks is near bankruptcy with 12 cent stock.

Only way to avoid further real estate losses is to force employees back to office.

WeWork was already having problems before Covid, and WFH would actually benefit WeWork since it means more mobile staff that could use a remote office in places where they can't find room at home.
A lot of companies get large investments from investors. Investors generally have a lot of stake in real estate.

Probably the same reason why small startups get fancy offices in the city center as soon as they get their investments, but there's no budget for salaries.

My hunch is that we're seeing an influence campaign by people who own lots of commercial real estate swaying bosses. I don't have any actual info about who owns or has a stake in commercial real estate, but my gut tells me it's likely to be really wealthy businesspeople who a bunch of CEOs probably look up to/play golf with/whatever.

There is the wonder why hold value on office space ersus the smaller companies that are bought and dropped with no sentimental value. The big difference there is that purchasing out a company doesn't usually come with a years-long agreement to keep it in place, use the products, etc. Office space has that. A years-long agreement to use the space and pay for the use. And to drop the use before the agreement is done costs more than it's worth. And it's even worse for a company that owns property. It costs money to keep the office space usable, money that comes from leases. If someone is going to back out of a lease, the owner of a building now has to pull from other sources of money to upkeep a building.

I know developers have spent years building and growing office buildings and regions to put said office buildings, and now a massive push to work remotely makes all that effort not just for nothing, but a very costly nothing. And then there is the secondary economy around office buildings. Many stores and restaurants spring up where there are plenty of people working. If there are no people, no reason for those businesses. I used to work in a downtown area with plenty of restaurants that I would eat at. Now that I don't work there, I don't eat at those restaurants anymore.

The push and call for remote work is going to change literal landscapes in cities and industrial regions in ways we cannot predict, or prevent.

Correct, my (large) company was literally getting bullied in the newspaper for no longer "contributing to the local economy by letting its employees work from home*.

Commercial real estate

The values of managers and business / capitalism. A manager should ideally be primarily focused on creating the conditions that allow their team to do their best work, but many people who get into management and I’m guessing most people at the executive level are people interested in power, influence, and control. Not being able to surveil their underlings takes away from that control. Managers also tend to be the types of types of people naturally suited to modern work culture - extroverts, workaholics, people who’s lives revolve around the careers. The kind of people who like being in the office. Then there is the capitalistic notion of infinite growth, improvement, and never ending increases in productivity, such that managers are pushed to squeeze their employees for every drop of their time, energy, and attention. Productivity gets defined by easy quantitative metrics like hours spent sitting still at a desk focused directly on work tasks, rather than ever being linked to things like a sustainable pace of work or work life balance or employees not living their lives with a constant feeling of dread and anxiety in their guts. Don’t expect managers to push for employee autonomy in forms like remote work when managers have been playing the game by a specific set of rules and motivations that have nothing to do with human quality of life.

Number of things at play.

Most companies can't take advantage even in theory of saving costs if they have an office today. If they own it, who is going to buy in this climate? (keeping in mind that if it is office space, then it pretty much has to stay office space, without exorbitant effort and money to change it to something else) My company has 10 years left on their lease, with penalties of vacating early so bad that they would be just as well letting the lease run. If there's one thing a company hates it's being forced to spend money/have assets that are not seeing use.

Contributing to the above, a lot of these folks have a big part of their portfolio invested in real estate, so collapse of the office space segment of real estate would be bad news for them.

A lot of management looks awfully superfluous in a remote worker scenario. Without the visual aid of dealing with people in person, it seems like maybe you could double the sizes of departments, maybe erase a layer of middle management. So management needs people in person to maintain the appearance of relevance.

Companies also like to give tours to clients and show a busy looking office space of people working toward their customers goals. You need people in person in order for those tours to look adequately impressive.

Some of their levers to get longer work out of people work better in the office. For example, my office had way less parking than they had people coming in, and an overflow lot dangling a literal mile away from the buildings. In response to complaints that there's no reasonable parking, that there's no shuttle, that folks have to cross a fairly busy street without a signal light, an executive said "if you cared about your work, you'd come in early enough to get a good spot". They considered people who came in at 8AM to be lazy slackers, because the real dedicated people came in at 7AM, even though office work technically started at 9AM for most of them.

Frankly, remote work isn't objectively more productive across the board. You can find/create metrics to "prove" either side of the argument (measuring "productivity" is really subjective, and many of the studies are self-reporting where employees decide for themselves their productivity, or even outright state how productive the workers feel. In my experience, individual productivity may see a boost with improved focus, removal of commute, fewer work social distractions. However, the relevance of the work may suffer (for example, in my group one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn't have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered) and others that depend on collaboration may falter (for example, new college hire is left adrift because it's really hard for an early career person to get traction in a pure remote scenario). We tend to care less about folks who are little more than icons next to text most of the day, or a disembodied voice for select meetings. Ambient collaboration takes a hit, as the barrier to talk to someone is a bit higher when you have to explicitly go to the trouble of typing a message or calling. It seems more intrusive.

As to why the message tends to be softball, well a number of things.

They don't want to get into the "data" game because the employees can find studies with data saying the exact opposite. Employees have a vested interest in believing their favored data.

Other statements are too aggressive, and they want to try to maintain some semblance of morale by being the "good guys". At least at the company level. From what I can tell, the corporate level at my job gets to send the happy, gentle prods to come into office, but the managers are expected to go as asshole as needed to "fix" the attendance problem.

one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn’t have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered

So management is relying on the workers to self organise, instead of providing clear direction on deliverables and the quality of those deliverables.

Sounds like the labor cost of quality management is being offset by travel costs incurred by the workers.
- That's the rub, management has no idea about the deliverables, they don't understand the product or customers at all. They got spoiled by a self actualizing team that figured things out better than the hierarchical leadership, and effectively peer leadership.
  
  When the group is broken up, then some folks stray, and while they are talented and working hard, they get caught up in their own little world when the work doesn't organically come.
  
  Frankly, while I bemoan how little our management does, I'm happier more directly engaging with clients, marketing, and sales. My peer groups that have clearly more direction handed down seem doomed to have suboptimal product inflicted by the game of telephone through the bureaucracy.
  
  In short, I see challenges either way it gets sliced. Self directed teams with clear purpose and connection can thrive in any scenario, however I feel like you are lucky to find 2-3 people to make that team, and there's some value to be added by having people along that might need some more clear steering.

there is really no logical reason. Working “in the office” is basically a bunch of distractions from idiot coworkers who don't know that email / instant messaging apps exist + trying to figure out what is for lunch and planning how to spend the hour+ coming in / going home.

Frankly the push is likely just because so many companies have invested in the real estate and infrastructure to make a physical office function that they feel they need to make that investment worth while, plus the inertia of old people not willing to just accept that things can be done differently. Similar thing with a 4 day work week, countless studies and actual implementations have proven that it is vastly more productive for companies and preferable for employees, but it will never be implemented in the US because we are conditioned to think running yourself ragged for your job is somehow a moral necessity.

In my personal opinion, anyone who is a wage slave that claims to “prefer going to the office” is probably someone who doesn’t now how to do their job without bothering their coworkers with basic questions they should know the answer to and/or is so devoid of meaningful personal relationships they only have their coworkers to interact with.

Work is for chumps.

Because they don't trust us. They want to take control and monitor everything we do during the work hours.

There are a whole lot of issues around commercial property and corporate taxes that interplay to mean that occupancy is heavily encouraged.

Same reason they all had layoffs at the same time; activist investors want them to. Probably because these investors own a lot of commercial real estate as well.

Also, it's probably a good way for them to reduce their workforce without publicly announcing layoffs.

I haven't had a normal job since before covid so i'm not super qualified, but:

I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit

I think they sometimes do, but not always. The reason being that companies are made of people, and people sometimes but not always think rationally.

In this case, my guess is middle management may be fretting about leaving employees unsupervised. What if they play games or browse Twitter on company time? You can't monitor them when they're not in the office!

Inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together” strikes me as common corporate wish-wash. It's sort of along the lines of "we're a family here". They're trying to make employees emotionally invested in the corpo so they'll put up with more bullshit.

Well yes, I do feel we might have collectively given more thought to this here than my company has...

It's just that I work in one of those places where a trivial change that our users are asking for requires a business case and endless discussion, so it's weird to think that a big, life-changing decision like this would just be taken without a particularly strong motivation.

But maybe I'm just starting from the wrong premise here. The purpose of the business case is for us little guys to obtain buy-in from the top management, but if a decision comes directly from the top management they don't need much more than their own gut feelings?

Maybe especially so if they have to make a decision based on an unprecedented situation with no data and no guidance from what other companies have done before.I can see how the least risky bet would seem returning to the previous, proven situation where most people were working in the office.
- Oh yeah, power in a corporation goes top down, and it figures that top management likes it that way.
  
  There's definitely safety to be found in the familiar, i do it a lot, whenever i have to do something unfamiliar i will often let myself get overwhelmed trying to consider all the tiny implications. Eventually though the experience from early adopters will enlighten other companies. It's a lot easier to take a decision like this when other people have done it and you have data to see what the results were. In the case of work from home, this process is already well underway, it's been three years since covid and there's already a lot of data that you can point to.

1% wealth is not pure money. It is stock and real estate. Also shares.

To keep the value of their wealth the 99% needs to spend.

I absolutely cannot find the article I read now, but it was about an employee tracking suite of tools that companies often use in workplaces. It allows them to gauge the productivity of employees using a combination of hardware and software. It’s apparently insanely expensive but useful for predatory companies that strive to squeeze every last remaining drop of hope from employees as long as it increases productivity. That’s the reason some companies want people back in office. So they can keep tabs on them.

There is a tangible benefit in certain jobs from being in the same space. I work in a place where we are constantly training new employees with OJT. Continuous improvement and learning new things from peers is important for our future capabilities. Knowledge sharing is a big part of my job.

We rotate in-office and work-from-home weeks and there is a considerable reduction in questions asked and just general training-type or knowledge sharing interactions. Being able to ask a question or provide guidance directly, in-person, and off the cuff is easier than messaging or calling. I definitely get more work done at home, but sacrifice future efficiency of myself, my peers, and the department as a whole because of the reduction of knowledge sharing interactions.

I think we have struck a good balance with the rotation in the time being. We could certainly try to figure out ways to make knowledge sharing and training easier and more effective to do remotely, but as our culture is now, working from home makes it less effective.

People need to learn to post in public (in the Corp) channels and then be able to search for answers.

In office you can just go walk over and ask someone and it's often never documented anywhere. In chat programs you can search and find information instead of asking your go to.
- While this is a nice idea, adoption of this kind of knowledge sharing is known to be extremely difficult to accomplish without a massive cultural shift in a company or department. Not to mention it requires those who are knowledgeable (typically older workers with less social media or computer experience) to be tech savvy enough to be active in a space dominated by younger employees asking questions.
  
  I am a proponent of trying to bring knowledge capture software and methods into my department and company but the struggle is real. Getting people on board with this idea will basically require those who aren't interested to leave by attrition for the culture to change enough to accept this idea. But those people who retire are exactly the people we want to capture knowledge from! It's really a difficult situation.

There are a whole slew of ways to look at this depending on what "glasses" you like to wear, and also the type of work involved. I work in grocery logistics, moving groceries from where they are produced to the store where you buy them. Here's a few from my "lens":

They are looking at the long term office space leases they are stuck with.
In person training tends to be more effective ( I remember reading a study on this, but can't currently find it.)
Most people suck at communicating effectively. Proximity seems to improve this. (Personal observation)
Community (It is far easier to "other" someone that you rarely or never meet in person. Not so easy if they are showing you pictures of their kids every day. "Sally just got a new particle accelerator! Isn't she so lovely! This is her sinking Manhattan!")
Leadership (I have to come into work to do my job. My boss's job though is mostly paperwork. He could do his job from home but why should I care what he has to say if he isn't in the same mud as me?)

My thought on this is if you want the flexibility of working from home, that's fine. But don't expect me to give a damn about what you think. The job is rough enough without an uninformed opinion trying to mess things up worse.

People showing pictures of their crotch goblins every day would be a excellent reason to embrace work from home.
Community (It is far easier to “other” someone that you rarely or never meet in person. Not so easy if they are showing you pictures of their kids every day. “Sally just got a new particle accelerator! Isn’t she so lovely! This is her sinking Manhattan!”)

That's just super relative.
All my active friendships are 90% online and many of those people I very deeply care about. We meet every now and then, on vacations or for special occasions, and have a really amazing time. But we also have a really good time doing online activities together, keeping in touch more or less daily via messages and actively sharing our lives with each other.

On the other hand, othering is very much a thing that happens in person and feels a lot worse when it does happen in person. When every day you see 2-3 colleagues acting differently with you than amongs themselves or with others.
Working from home it is a lot easier to be selective with people you interact beyond the work stuff and avoid negative interactions, or interactions that drain your social batteries.

There's a thing that cult leaders often do where they make increasingly stricter demands on their followers, it reduces the number of members, but the one who remain are much more easily controlled (because they self selected for that trait. I think something similar is part of the picture for these companies. The people who simply do as they are told and come back (as opposed to looking for new jobs) are more easily controlled by the company.

Also you can't always assume that just because a company is really big it's always making the most best, always correct choices. Like GE managed with "vitality curves."

You guys are still doing homeoffice? I've been back for over a year.

We're supposed to be doing hybrid, 50% in the office. I don't think we ever went over 30-35% of people in the office. My company tried the carrot, more than the stick to get employees back, like events. Everybody hated the almost-full office in those days. Most teams tried to have in-person team meetings, so there were no available meeting rooms and nobody is really used to the noise of an open-office plan full of people. There is clearly some push from above on our managers, because they try to sound happy but they mostly look as miserable as everyone else.

How was the return for you? Is the whole company back in the office or just you/your team?
- How was the return for you? Is the whole company back in the office or just you/your team?
  
  Everyone is back and has been since like may 2022. I don't think we even considered keeping homeoffice around longer than it was mandated.
  
  Also I never really had to return. I live closest to the office, so I stayed there while everyone else went home. Someone has to let in the mailman and such.
Since 2020, my specific team only meets in person 3 times per year, with one or two members deciding to come into the office once every 2 weeks (because they want to).

We discovered early on that we were more productive WFH (with metrics to back it up), so we only have live meetups to organize big projects. We then take those big plans home with us and get it done remotely.

I can’t say it would work for every team, but I definitely don’t see the value in “being in the office” as someone who works entirely on the computer.

I see a lot of propaganda about how teams are more productive when they have “spontaneous interactions around the water cooler”, but in my experience that was never really a driving factor of our work.
- My department works almost entirely on the computer but is made up of knowledge workers. We found that our metrics also reflected improved efficiency. However, our metrics didn't (and likely can't) measure knowledge sharing interactions and training effectiveness to compare working from home with in the office. Most of our department has noticed and believes that knowledge sharing and training interactions decrease when working from home. This is not good for long term health and efficiency of the department. In 5 to 10 years the quality of work we provide will go down (or at least not improve as much as it could) without these interactions. So a small sacrifice in efficiency now could be worth it in the long run.
  
  It's hard to quantify exactly what is being sacrificed one way or the other. The only way to really find out is to experiment and see what happens long term.

Is retail near office buildings worth considering in the context of this post? That it’s worth having people return to the offices partially because the employees give business to the nearby restaurants, etc.?

This is true. I just had trouble picturing the CEO of a big company going "I'll force everyone back to the office! WFH is sooo convenient but I can't do this to Mr Joe's hamburger joint around the corner".

However as someone else pointed out, if WFH becomes the norm, a lot of business might be impacted and fail, generating turbulence in the economy. This I can picture getting a CEO's attention
- It's simpler in my mind: corps get local tax incentives for their footprint. EG they run a calculation on how their foot traffic impacts the local economy and take a tax break based on the "value" of "their" employees to the local businesses.
  
  If they go to wfh/ hybrid, their foot traffic drops and the tax bill goes up.
That's a side affect, but those retail stores could also move out to where the houses are with some legal changes.

It would be a nice suprise but I doubt corporate really cares about Jane and Joe's coffee shop, or the local Hugo Boss
I can see the points on it, but I also know that I am prone to ordering delivery from my local shops or going to the mom and pop restaurant around the corner. The only ones who will really be hurt by a mostly WFH society (at least in this vein of thought) are big corporations who have heavily centered their efforts around the offices. Starbucks will have problems justifying having 4 shops in one block in NYC with 1/10th the foot traffic. I would rather buy from local small businesses and actually support my economy than funnel more money into some gaping dragon's maw. I have been WFH for 7 years now and pray I never have to go back to working anywhere else.

Power hungry middle managers mainly

The companoes are locked into commercial real estate

2 ) Working at home is making the middle manager obsolete. I think google's ceo said that he didn't know how to promote managers he cant see. I personally think mamagement is corporate welfare.

I wonder this same thing about my company. The only rational theory I've heard - which is completely unconfirmed - is that they aren't willing to sell the building because it's still needed for the IT team and a few other purposes, but need a certain occupancy level to not be penalized on their taxes.

In office communication is much more efficient. It is easier to understand (and pay attention to) people in the same room as you than it is to understand people on a call (especially since most people don't have a great microphone and Internet and LAN quality can vary). Some employers have adopted a policy of grouping meetings to designated meeting days and encouraging employees to come in on those.

These are mostly excuses.

If your employee isn't paying attn during meetings and not performing well due to that, that's a performance issue. Not a location issue.

If they're not paying attn and are still performing well, maybe the meeting has no value.

Companies should provide the necessary equipment to do the job. That includes an adequate headset, camera, etc... Not providing a $50 headset is not a reason to enforce a commute.

I've had a remote managers and remote teams for almost a decade now. When I had an office to go to I was often less productive due to all the distractions. Being in a physical location makes it too easy for people to try and jump the queue and just walk over to my desk.

While I miss (and I very much do miss) the socializing aspect of a shared workspace it didn't make me more productive.

My current job, which is completely remote, with a geographically spread out team, takes steps to mitigate the separation. Most work related convos take place in an open text channel unless they're private. So you get that, "I heard you taking to Bob about XYZ".

We use cameras on team meetings. It helps with the human connection as well as with being present when you can see other people and look them in the eye.
- Teleconference is, at best, good enough and will never have the quality of in person discussion.
  
  I am not aware of any teleconference software that uses perfectly lossless audio. Those small losses, though hard to hear, can increase the cognitive load of participants. Even with expensive headsets and good software, audio volumes will vary from speaker to speaker. Automatic volume leveling loses even more audio fidelity.
  
  Due to physics (i.e. we cannot send a signal faster than the speed of light) and processing, there will be additional delay. It makes it hard for people to talk without speaking over each other. It makes discussions trickier since people are hesitant to talk right after one another. Instead of interrupting with questions, they will hold questions until the end, when the context may be forgotten, or don't ask questions at all.
  
  Even assuming that everyone has good lighting and has their camera pointed perfectly, body language is often lost. Every meeting software I have used hesitates to switch the focused speaker too often. If two people are talking back and forth, one will be religtated to a thumbnail video. When someone is presenting, they cannot easily scan the room to see reactions.
  
  So, when talking on a meeting, the participants hear (almost) everything being said, but they miss out on all of the non-verbal communication and even some subtleties of the sound.
But a business doesn't need to own office space for sporadic meetings. There are rentable meeting rooms in many cities, in libraries, in some coffee shops, universities, colleges, conference buildings, etc. Plus they're a lot nicer than dingy offices.
- Sure, but many are probably locked into long leases. These leases also cover things like server rooms, show rooms, and storage areas. All of that can be moved, but there is cost (and risk) in moving them. Plus, it is convenient to have work areas for employees to use between meetings.
  
  Also, some people, like me, prefer to work outside of their home, so it is good to have us in a single place so we can have impromptu meetings.
  
  Some companies are reducing office space, taking desks away from employees that come in rarely or even switching to a hot bunk model (several employees share the same office and come in on different days) or a hotel model (employees sit in any open office and are expected to take all personal items home at the end of the day).

Aside from wasting money on rent, it’s control. If you can hit you KPI’s and you have more time in the day, they want to be able to pile on additional work. It’s harder for them to do that if they’re not breathing down your neck

Whether you like the idea of company culture etc not withstanding, it's easier to push in office where people are sitting in an environment that you have the power to craft and shape. As a predominantly call center based business our reporting has shown improvement moving from pure WFH to hybrid, I'm not going to apply that to other businesses, but for us it worked out that way.

I will take improved productivity over improved company culture. People don't give a crap about company culture as they don't stick around for 35 years anymore.

Owners and executives may own companies that own the buildings and don’t want their investments to fail.

If we don't lay off employees, how can the stock price rise? With the stock price rising, the cost of labor decreases, killing two birds with one stone.

I WFH on permanent contract for one of the big ones. I never been at the office, I was recruited online, had my interview online and gotten about 4 months of training online , some more to come.

It works fine. I am more productive than in an office.

Equipment needed are provided and if I need anything I can just order it without much hassle, on the company dime of course. Knowledge is shared between everyone and all information is written down somewhere.

So why are they doing it this way? They get a bunch of well educated people from all over the world. Great pay for the job, not so good if I had an employment in my field.

But everyone are happy since they can WFH. The company get some really good people. At the same time they are forcing some back to the office in other areas. Because well realestate , but also because they didn't have the organisation in place before the pandemic.

The surveillance part is really not a hard thing for them to do, we are measured on all kind of things. I assume it's harder for them to do this in other areas.

And those are the ones they force back to the office and at tha same time weed out the ones who won't accept it.

Never going to the office again , I almost would accept a sale position over that.

Sadly, I suspect this is another case of "many people are not good at their jobs". Not necessarily the workers, but company leadership.

Most new businesses fail. Many established businesses fail. Some of that is skill, or lack there of, but a lot is also luck.

If one lacks skill and my company has a run of bad luck, then blaming the most recent change is rational. This is true even if one has refused to, or been ineffective at, adjusting to changed circumstances.

Blaming a failing business on something outside oneself is an ego saving move.

I expect the biggest pushers of return to office, that also have no clear business need, are not doing well. I anticipate many backward looking reports about a large number of projects and businesses failing due to a lack of ability to adjust.

Going back to in-person now would absolutely wreak havoc on my psyche bc no one at my company knows what I look like or what I actually do so I'd rather keep it that way

I know someone who works in IT at a place where they found that keystrokes rose 40% in office and significantly more work was completed as measured by story points. Keystrokes aren’t a great way to measure productivity, but it’s very suspicious that people somehow had to type less when they have to type to talk to anyone and often don’t have to in office.

It’s not perfectly scientific, but businesses pretty much never have scientific data to work with and the evidence they have says people overall are more productive in office.

I know someone who works in IT at a place where they found that keystrokes rose 40% in office and significantly more work was completed as measured by story points. Keystrokes aren’t a great way to measure productivity, but it’s very suspicious that people somehow had to type less when they have to type to talk to anyone and often don’t have to in office.

It’s not perfectly scientific, but businesses pretty much never have scientific data to work with and the evidence they have says people overall are more productive in office.
- Thanks for the article, it's an interesting one and it's one of the few I've seen that describes actual research on WFH productivity

The real answer is that people are more productive in the office with more oversight and build relationships with their coworkers that help them to do their jobs better. Companies invest thousands of dollars in "teambuilding" events that benefit the company and employees in no way other than to foster these environments. It costs their employees more time and money for transportation, which means they have to pay them more. They are not stupid. They are not trying to upset their employees just to cost themselves more money.

There is no other rational explanation. Any other explanation is illogical, as it costs the company more money to have and maintain an office building. It's just based on people angry about the fact that they have to leave home.

Found the Blackstone bot.
people are more productive in the office with more oversight and build relationships with their coworkers that help them to do their jobs better.

Not true for all types of employees. There are job functions that work great or even better remote. Your scenario also depends on if the employer has a good office environment and truth be told a lot don't (many embraced the "open-concept" which does increase communication but also the noise-to-signal ratio).

The war on remote work likely has nothing to do with productivity but all about preserving the commercial real-estate market (and the auxillary businesses) and stop them from crashing. A lot of influential people invested in that industry.
- Also research over COVID showed productivity didn't decline at all, and in many cases increased while working remote. Turns out a lot of people work better when they aren't wasting half their day getting in a small box, trekking to a dofferent small box inside a bigger box for absolutely no reason.
- The war on remote work likely has nothing to do with productivity but all about preserving the commercial real-estate market
  
  I mean...maybe if you work for a real estate company?