You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.
But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.
- In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work.
- If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.
If you signed to work in an office and don't like it, resign.
Nobody will cry over it, just know that you signed for something you did not like. Your fault.
Also: people working from remote do that at the expenses of others too. When I am at the office to talk with my colleagues, the one person refusing to come over forces all of us (10 or so) to turn on the video conference in some meeting room, while we could have had the same chat in the garden of the bar down the office.
How people work is a mutual agreement, not something that's being done to one group by another.
We used to have a stand-up meeting each morning at a time "when everyopne's arrived" and we used to have a whiteboard on the wall with the most current tasks. None of this can work with even one remote worker, so it's gone to scheduled Zooms, online task managers, and endless Slack messages.
I love the fact that I can always go back to Slack and say “See? This is what we agreed upon”, instead of having to recall the specifics of a meeting where notes weren’t taken in detail.
Nor do I see any increased willingness to hash out complex issues in writing. The moment things get even slightly complex in a thread, it’s “let’s hop on a call.”
As someone who had to train many junior employees, having a record trail is the best answer to the question “why the hell did we do this in the first place?”.
Perhaps it's likely at least some managers want more people to come to the office.
It's also likely that some people who aren't managers, regular employees, just prefer the office.
The quote points at “social dynamics” and “competition” in offices, not personal relationships or even friendships. Meaning that the mere fact of being surrounded by people with relatively the same professional goals, is good enough for some craving for social interaction. There isn’t necessarily any more depth to it, and it doesn’t really solve any other pending socialising issues.
How is that not a bad thing?
It's the "root cause" fix.
Offices have hierarchy, promotions, payscales, politics. Socializing in the office is a PC minefield.
My current direct manager is about my age, with kids about my kids age, he is an overall great guy. If we weren't working together I am sure we would have beers together, but in the current context I would hate to blur the work/leisure line.
But, don't force me to make my life worse for that reason. You like the office? Go to the office.
Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.
I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.
Now that everyone wants to do that, without the knowledge or the experience to do it, but only because they want to work in their pajamas (let's be honest!) I am forced to go through endless meetings where the first half is about "can you hear me?" "can you see me?" "where is X?" "coming, is in another meeting" "OK let's wait another 5 minutes then" and then half of them has an horrible voice quality, worse video, you have to repeat the same things over and over for the benefit of those not listening (let's be honest!) etc etc
it's exhausting and the fact that we aren't physically in the same room make people think two hours meetings are something normal
It's making me frankly think that all of this "freedom to work everywhere" trope has gone too far.