Is going back to the office such a huge thing in other countries? Here in Germany almost nothings changed from the main COVID time in terms of home office.
It seems like our standard of working has transformed and will not revert back.
It seems like our standard of working has transformed and will not revert back.
When COVID more or less "left" corporate culture, a lot of US businesses wanted to go fully back to work or to make remote work a benefit, i.e., you'd take cuts elsewhere for the privilege to work remotely/from home.
While some of it is likely power-tripping on the part of managers, I suspect some of it is more complex involving expensive building leases and trying to justify costs, fear of "what happens if the culture shifts again and we need to find office space", which I do think is a reasonable concern, but not to the point that it should shut down remote work entirely.
Anecdotally, I do know quite a few higher management ones who were very upset by remote work; they liked the idea of having "their" employees in a single spot so they could check it at any time for various projects; some relented when after an honest talk they conceded they never really checked in person and did everything by chat/call/email anyways, but there were a few sticklers that just honestly believed "butts in chairs or we lose all productivity", even though 2 years of data from COVID times shattered this belief entirely.
Part of why I think the position was so predominant in the US was that the job market power was so vastly different there; in European countries, it was far more competitive for a company seeking candidates and this gave a lot more negotiating power for employees I think since there was certainly a job lined up for them, whereas in the US it was a bit more uncertain that you could get a position since there were so many more candidates than positions in many cases, so businesses had the ability to be far more exclusive and demanding.
The quality of the data senior leaders typically use to make business decisions like this are usually either very poor and would never pass any kind of statistical or scientific bar, or non-existent. It's usually just a gut feeling and they roll with it. Managers just usually have no idea how to manage a remote team and go about replicating the physical office in digital form.