And yet barely anyone visits the office… I WONDER WHY.
1) I prefer working in an office.
2) I must have good public schools—non-negotiable.
3) I'm going to hate & resent my commute unless it's also physically-active time (walking, biking) and fairly safe. The cost, the unpleasantness, the lost time. The risk, for that matter.
This combo means the happiest place I'm at all likely to end up is remote working. It's damn near impossible to satisfy requirement 2 and also preference 3 while working in an office. So preference 1 is sacrificed, making 3 moot and 2 easier to satisfy. It's not a hard call to make.
4) Affordable
When office attendance is optional and only 20-30% of people show up, these things feel so much more forced and not as fun.
I know the point you are trying to make is that these are dumb distractions people don’t care about compared to WFH. But I think there is a “critical mass” aspect as well. Offices, for me, are much better to work in when there’s a community, and not just a pimped-out first-party WeWork
So I would say that it’s not just people who want to go vs people who don’t. There is a third category that basically doesn’t see the point if the office is “just” a working environment and doesn’t have enough actual coworkers there, which I find myself in, and I suspect many others do too.
Also it makes no sense in a lot of scenarios. For example i am 800km away from the office.
I think the solution will come in sorting companies into remote or in-person, rather than having every company be a mix of both.
To echo the sibling comment, long term, I think it would be good for teams to be separated based on office policy. One team for pure WFH, one for hybrid (which can mean many different things), one for mainly going to the office, etc.
In my case I see it as a prisoners dilemma kind of thing. I’m officially 3/2 hybrid with unenforced 3 day attendance, along with 80% of my team. I like that I can still choose to WFH on those 3 days and my team can do the same. But we have reached an equilibrium where there’s basically no point to go to the office on those days because nobody else would be there, even though we all had the option to go officially remote (so we were all ok with going to the office). I think in that case, for example, we need at least one “actually everybody should go to the office” day for the 80% that aren’t remote
Maybe 1/5th of the office showed up. 3-4 times as many people as normal, but barely anyone.
1) stay home, dick around (or do laundry, play with children, whatever)
2) dick around at the office (ping pong, fancy beer, etc.)
3) stay home, get work done
4) get work done in the office
Under mandatory office attendance, you are only really allowed to choose between 2 and 4, so naturally more people will choose 2. Under optional attendance, all choices are available, so more people will choose 1