Would you rather have a temp office space that you could use..
Or
Would you rather take 5K extra base salary and not go into the office, plus the company provides an extra 2-3K for you home office.
Cubes in major metro areas and the office equipment cost, plus security, cost way more than 8K per head. Charlie could save a fortune if he started selling office space, getting out of leases, and stopped these silly demands of going into the office. He could give everyone an extra 5K salary and a nice stipend of 2-3K for home office equipment and still be way ahead. Sales people and branch employees would obviously need to go in to connect with customers. Even IT, they could have everyone install a VM on their personal laptop paid for with the 2-3K. Even the server farm headcount wouldn't have to show up, everything would be offsite cloud.
That doesn't even factor in all the happy employees he would have. Charlie needs to get ahead of the other major banks and this is the way.