There is no conspiracy theory here.
Most people will work 4 hour work days when working remotely. (And if they're working an 8 hour work day it's because they're working two remote jobs at the same time.)
"No loss of productivity" is a flat out lie.
"No loss of productivity" is a flat out lie.
That's your management's problem, not yours. Your labor contract says that you owe the company your time, how they use it is not your business.
Requiring and taking time for purposes other than creating value for the company is nothing more than punishment. I understand being angry that you're sitting in the office twiddling thumbs while others are at home cooking. The solution here is not to punish those people for your own, and everyone's, in-office woes. The solution is to demand better for yourself.
I work in an office 5 days a week. I'll say right now - close to half of my time is wasted. However, I am still here in the office. Yes that absolutely sucks to know I could work 20 hours a week and achieve the same outcome. However, I am not "better" because I have enjoyed the punishment of spending that time. I am not more loyal nor more proficient. I am not less lazy. Pain IS NOT gain - that's a lie told by people with the intention of manipulating you to argue in favor of your own exploitation.
I'd love to see actual stats on this, because I hear it a lot on HN (pretty much exclusively from the pro-office side) but I can't imagine there's that many people doing this. Even if there was, why is this a problem? Presumably they're getting work done in those 4 hours that is satisfactory to the business, so what if they do some work on the side as well? Who cares?
I do hybrid (2 times a week in the office) and don't mind it, but I know for a fact that pretty much every single person in my team does much less work on the office days than when they're remote, because we're mostly socializing, taking coffee breaks and taking full advantage of our 1-hour lunch break (rather than the 15 minutes it takes at home to just eat the meal). Most of us will even opt out of office days when we have a big deadline.
Hell, I'm much less productive at the office simply because the chairs & monitors suck. At home I've got a quad 4K monitor setup in an extremely comfortable chair, my own desk, my own food & beverages of choice, my own music blasting as loud (or quiet) as I want it. How could I be more productive in the office?
Turns out most people aren't mischievous children that have to be under constant supervision to get work done, and in fact they were better when given the freedom to approach the work in a way that suits them best.
Your manager, because your employment contract is about time spent, not works delivered.
cue the old saw about how an engineer gets hired back to fix a problem at his old company -- he bills them $2500, $50 for the hour, and $2450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
And if there are people working 4 hours a day remotely, how productive do you think those same people are just because they're sat in an office?
Nutshell: I think this is a nonsense argument.
If you're sitting in an office twiddling your thumbs for 4 hours a day you're not defrauding your employer.
If you're at home working a second job (or mowing your lawn) for 4 hours a day then you're committing fraud and violating your contract with your employer.
Fundamentally it's a legal issue about fraud.
If you want remote work then you need a very different kind of employment contract. (One that specifies concrete deliverables, not time owed.)
So you just want to lord over the minions, even if they're not actually doing anything for half the day? You don't actually care about productivity, you just care that you can exert your power over them and have them rot in a cubicle doing nothing, even if they were doing equal amounts of work in both situations.
Complaining that they're not properly using the time they bought is like claiming you can joyride your neighbor's expensive sports car because he's not using it most of the time anyways.
We're a remote heavy company and we don't have that type of contract, and it all works really well.
So no, you don't need it.
We are now past that point where everyone plays nice working remotely.
However, management bought 8 hours of your time and not 4 when they hired you.
So the times you’re off on the weekends doing no work is valuable to the company because you’re recharging your mind and possibly also thinking about problems subconsciously.
I went to check my job offer, and it doesn’t mention anything about 40 hour weeks or 8 hour days.
Nowhere in my employment contract does it say that.
Realistically, I am allowed to spend up to 8 hours to work on goals that my employer says I should work on. It is also understood that if the goals are completed earlier, I am free to fill the "free" part of 8 hours with self-learning.
There's also an implicit understanding that certain life activities may happen/overlap with that free time, e.g. eating/picking up kids.
Only in the most pedantic bad take world would your statement be correct.