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….

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

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.

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 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.

Commercial real estate

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.?