Is there evidence for whatever these reasons are?
And a lot of executives like LARPing Big Important Business Guys and walking the parapets to survey their domain which is much harder to do when everyone is on Zoom.
Here is a true story from several jobs ago: it was a small company and the CEO was fond of saying "people don't work when they work from home."
One day they were doing some construction on the building and the workers literally cut through the internet cable to the office. It was going to take a few days to repair.
Even then we still had to come sit in the office even though we were an internet based company with an internet based product and even things like our code repos and all that were online so we couldn't do much of anything.
He very begrudgingly let the customer service people go work from home but the rest of us had to sit in the office without internet just in case it came up.
I, of course, had to say something.
"Surely in this case," I say, "if we were to go home and do literally any work, it would be an improvement over the 0 work we can do right now. Like any work at all is an improvement, yes?"
He sighed and shook his head because I, a fool, just didn't get it.
"But you could work if we had internet," he said, and then grew larger and larger as he powered up to destroy me, "and anyway, people don't work when they work from home".
In addition, while I enjoy being able to work from my apartment (though my company now mandates being in the office once per week, though pre-pandemic I worked in the office 3 days per week), I recognize that not everybody thrives under remote work. I live in a one-bedroom apartment by myself, and my apartment neighbors are not disruptive (at least during work hours). Working remotely would be more challenging if I had roommates, or if my neighbors were loud during the day; under those circumstances I'd have to look for alternative work locations such as libraries, coffee shops, or even rented private offices. Not all remote workers are highly paid, and not all remote workers are in situations where they can move to 2,000+ sq. ft. homes in the countryside. There's also something to be said about camaraderie, which is important for some companies and for some people and is harder to build virtually than in person.
I just wish the housing situation wasn't so messed up in much of the world's tech hubs....today's housing prices near offices, whether renting or purchasing, are brutal, forcing many people to make choices that have a degraded quality of life, such as long commutes, living in cramped conditions, and/or living in high-crime areas.
I think the most dramatic example is Mark Zuckerburg's about face. Here is a huge company that literally bet their name and future on remote work, that is extremely well equipped to operate remotely for that exact reason. That decision to bring everyone in is not some managerial preference or slight inefficiency. To be so dramatic, the root must be an existential distrust of remote work from the very top.
That is all.
Over the years I worked in cube farms where the CIO would come at 3pm like clockwork to see if people were actually working or slacking off. Probably because despite being agiley, shit was broken.
Then I worked in an “open plan” office where I had to elbow my coworkers so I had enough space to type on the keyboard. Shit was still broken but damn there were now three times as many developers as before.
It was and is the result of incompetent management and the corporate culture that rewards them. The incentives is not about getting shit done but to build their ego and feudal empire.
It must be more than the stereotypes of managers needing
to physically see their underlings working?
Probably doesn't hurt that there's a lot of overlap between "people who run big companies" and "people who own commercial real estate" either - those "office expenses" are somebody else's profits!
Actually do some productive work?
that said, your question is one-sided. what about the obvious deficits of remote work?
the office expense is not much of a benefit. rent and housekeeping is a sunk cost, unless you completely shutter the office. and, the beatings will continue until morale improves, so we can throw that one out as well.
"More than a year has passed since I wrote this article for Fortune: Remote Work is Just Work. And as I’m reading about Zoom adopting a “structured hybrid” approach, Michael Bloomberg’s OpEd in the WaPo, and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s outspoken support for office-based work, I’m surprised that what I wrote so long ago is still controversial.
What I’m not surprised about is that many companies – even the biggest and most financially successful – are choosing to go back to the office. Why? Because all-remote work is hard, and it’s even harder for companies who didn’t start off all-remote from day one. It requires discipline at scale, each and every day, to get right. Companies that get remote work right have that level of discipline and are laser focused on communicating async (https://bit.ly/4562EK3).
The future of work is not about where you work; it’s about how you work. Let’s all take advantage of the fact that remote work introduced to virtually every company the tools, systems, and behaviors that create efficiency and inclusivity.
And let’s stop the remote-work-is-over debate. That’s a tired conversation.
I challenge leaders who are thinking about giving up on remote work to change the discussion.
The solution isn’t about transforming the workplace; it’s about transforming work. "
I think there is something to what he is talking about. Most companies don't embrace the way you work, i.e. async (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...) thus not gaining its full potential.