Because of the already sunk cost into office space?
Any other reasons?
I know I can drive 40 min and stare at the same laptop and email/zoom with the same people.
What’s in it for me? All I see is unnecessary agony, and a lot of it.
I produce more from home. Why does an employer want me to suffer more, even if it will cost them? What’s in it for them?
It really depends on the work you're doing. And even for a single employee, it can change from one month to the next. But highly collaborative work can benefit from spontaneous interactions, more ambiguous work can benefit from live whiteboarding sessions, and more generally, teams can develop greater cohesion and stronger relationships through shared experience. Not every person needs this, and certainly not all the time, but to suggest that it's unimaginable that anyone could ever derive greater value (or that a collective organization could ever derive greater value) from in-person work is disappointing.
Remote work has its place. In-person work has its place. Neither is the solution 100% of the time.
Some people get a lot of energy from interacting one on one with others. These tend to be the loudest voices in any office.
But so many people who are more introvered have just forced themselves to adapt.
I guess what I'm trying to say, for everyone that wants to get back to the office, many of us had wanted to get out for a very long time.
When working from the office, I close the door in the morning and open it when I leave.
The 3 or 4 conference room meetings I had per month had half of the attendees on zoom. Being in the same conference room didn’t do much for me.
I still have no idea what socialization people speak of. Office small talk? Happy hours?
Are they worth spending 10 hours a week driving and losing all the benefits of working from home? Certainly not to me.
Where I take issue is with people suggesting that it would be insane to ever ask anyone to come to an office again, for the same reason I think it would be insane to tell people that working from home is a waste of time/not productive/etc. To this end, a hybrid work environment may not be any better, since it forces an individual person to balance both (I.e. your extroverts are still expected to be home 2x/week, and your introverts are still expected to be at the office 3x/week)
The challenge for leaders of companies that are trying to navigate this (and one of the reasons that people will probably always be dissatisfied with the outcome) is that there is no perfect solution. You go full remote, you'll have people who miss the office (and almost certainly some intangibles will be lost). You go full in-office, and you'll have some less productive people who spend way too much time commuting and pay too much in rent. You go hybrid, and you still have people paying too much in rent, and now they also have to commute sometimes, and the people who want to be in the office aren't for 2 days/week, etc. Adding insult to injury, if you allow individual people to make their own decisions (some remote, some in-office) you'll have imbalances in career progressions, where people who have more facetime will be more likely to receive promotions and raises than their less visible, fully-remote counterparts.
It's a challenging topic, and it's not clear to me there is a solution that is "fair," insofar as fairness is even a thing we can measure here.
In which direction?
As a strongly introverted person myself, I would expect that working from home would be easier for extroverts than introverts during normal times. Extroverts make friends more easily wherever they go, while introverts rely more on structured interactions such as work in their social life. Take the office away, and the introvert who has recently relocated may not know anyone in the area.
Surely this must be a big part of it, but I haven't seen any good discussions about the topic. Workers are being massively inconvenienced and the environment is being put under unnecessary stress to prop up the value of now-redundant real estate.
Destroying the biosphere is the end of life.
Yeah, Apple Park did cost ~5 billion dollars, and its still less than five years old so they haven't gotten a great return on investment yet.
I'm a 100% remote work maximalist, I think in the long run physical offices for creative work will be non-existent. However, the fact is that the tools we have today are about 5-10 years behind where they need to be to be able to replace the social presence benefits of physical co-presence.
I am speaking of roles who successfully performed 100% of their work from home in the last year.
Also, why are engineers being forced to come back to the office?
But I definitely prefer to work in an office.
> Why does an employer want me to suffer more, even if it will cost them?
In this question, there is an embedded assumption that your employer wants you to suffer more.
The people making these decisions wouldn't have jobs if the "company culture" was all remote.
Didn’t Einstein work on relatively writing papers and mailing letters to his peers?
(The current city planning commissioner has actually said that Apple employees shouldn’t be allowed to live there because they are all single men and will hire prostitutes.)