For what it’s worth: I’m at a company that did survey employees on this question. The results actually leaned toward return to office for a lot of the non-engineering parts of the company.
Within engineering, the more junior people really wanted to return to office. The people with 10 years of experience and 2 kids at home really wanted to stay home. Not surprising, really.
Our engineering team remained remote, but not everyone is happy about it. I get emails every other week asking engineers to not come into the office very often because we don’t have enough extra desks for remote employees to be in the office very frequently.
> Did you care to ask your employees what they think? Why not?
While I do think it’s very important to keep employee’s desires and career goals in consideration, questions like these aren’t necessarily aligned with what’s best for the company or getting work done. If you survey employees about how many hours they’d prefer to work each week or how big they want their next raise to be, you’re not going to get answers that reflect what’s best or even realistic from a business perspective.
That doesn’t mean you can ignore your employees desires, of course! But you do have to keep in mind that most employees will default to responding with what’s best for them personally, and for a lot of people from the general population that can mean something very different than what’s best for their team or the company.