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Which leaves the question of what is motivating it?

As someone who works in a software shop that sells directly to this sector, I have a guess (and it’s just a guess but a quasi-informed one):

Office/Building leases.

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What about them?

Many companies, like mine, are somewhere in the middle of a 10 year lease with very steep early exit penalties. People think that having everyone working from home saves the company money, but when it comes to the office, chances are it’s already a sunk cost. In my company’s case, we’re paying for quite a bit of space, but currently allowing people to choose whether to come in or not. Most of the time only a handful of people do, but the office is still there whether 10, 100 or 1,000 people are using it. Plus, there’s a lot of capitalized equipment set up there, already paid for and waiting for people to use it. Moving out would be expensive (because of the lease break fees), and a hassle. So instead, the people in charge of a lot of companies probably rationalize that they might as well get some benefit out of those sunk costs by forcing people to use them again.

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