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.
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.
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.
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?”.
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.”