Those who manage but don’t do work love talking about how the office is this magical collaboration circus, where the brilliance of human minds connect like voltron to form Genius. What usually happens is that you can talk to people in person quicker, but oftentimes you’re hearing whatever bullsh-t someone else is yammering on about. Managers and CEOs like to have people in the office so that they’re able to arbitrarily, using cues unrelated to work, decide who’s a “hard worker” and a “team player,” because that feels more like being a CEO than actually evaluating people’s work, or hiring managers that can do so themselves.
I am not suggesting that a team never meets and never does anything together, but I think the requirement of X days in the office is ridiculous without an actual impetus to do so. Arbitrarily saying “oh you have to be in three days a week” based on the idea that something might happen is generally something that we tell firefighters, because things get put on fire all the time. When it comes to doing coding or writing stuff, what’s the point? Am I waiting around hoping that Steve the CS rep will hear me complaining about something and come up with a magical solution? Or that talking with my friends by the water cooler is going to change my life?
There are those who enjoy going to the office, and indeed there are reasons to go to the office, but most of them are really reasons to meet your co-workers in person. These things can be executed by going to a dinner, or a meeting hall, and all talking and having a point of being there - but such things require actual planning and thinking, and don’t make the boss feel like they’re controlling everyone like little puppets.
The decisions have to be overwhelmingly informed by workers rather than management. The people who actually put in the hours doing work generally understand the sh-t that’s going on in the day-to-day that would be disrupted or improved, but company-wide decisions are usually informed by middle-management types that simply present other people’s work, thus they want these people in front of them to point at and harangue.
The ideal hybrid work environment, to me, is difficult to imagine without completely reimagining why we go into the office. If it’s for pragmatic reasons, the visits to the office should be optional and pragmatic - once a month, for a specific reason, for a specific amount of time. If it’s for social reasons…well, maybe socializing is a bad justification for going to work? If a meeting can be done virtually, what reason is there to do it in person, beyond the fact that it feels nice to see people (for some)?
It’s a difficult subject, because there’re some who simply like going to work and being there. There are hundreds of years of people building companies by going to offices, and in about a year many companies managed to adjust well enough to not doing so. I think that the nature of the pandemic meant that people returning to the office now are doing so out of a relief that “it’s over,” without a consideration on the executive level of the lessons learned from letting people work from home. If people are desperate to come back to the office, perhaps the simple lesson is still that they don’t need to be there - but that they can if they want to, and they can work remotely as much as they’d like.
I’m biased in the sense that I have worked remote for around a decade, and my business is one that can be done entirely via email. That being said, I really believe that remote is something that overwhelmingly benefits the worker - it removes the soft wage theft of commuting and worker judgment for leaving on time, it removes geographic restraints, it removes a degree of the physical and aesthetic requirements of the office, and it focuses in on actually doing stuff versus appearing to do stuff.
I also believe that it disempowers pathological management, which is why some companies are so resistant to it. People start businesses for many reasons, but a major one is power - the ability to control and dispatch people at will, which requires to some extent the ability to physically see them. Remote work creates a neutral geography for work - you are not on the boss’ turf, you are not able to be marched into their office, and your co-workers cannot see you get in trouble. Bosses also love having fancy offices to take pictures of and send to their di--head friends, and they love having them full of worker bees. These aesthetics are depressing, but they are motivators.
And, yeah, it’s going to make hiring more difficult for them too, because you can’t offer fringe benefits like Summer Fridays or Ping Pong or Office Happy Hours. When they want someone in the office three days a week, they’re going to have to answer why, and that answer is going to have to be multitudes more satisfying than “I want to make sure we have spontaneity,” which is definitely how spontaneity works. Remote work inherently messes with the power dynamic of the worker and the boss, and it is going to make many, many brains malfunction.