Owners and executives may own companies that own the buildings and don’t want their investments to fail.

Sadly, I suspect this is another case of "many people are not good at their jobs". Not necessarily the workers, but company leadership.

Most new businesses fail. Many established businesses fail. Some of that is skill, or lack there of, but a lot is also luck.

If one lacks skill and my company has a run of bad luck, then blaming the most recent change is rational. This is true even if one has refused to, or been ineffective at, adjusting to changed circumstances.

Blaming a failing business on something outside oneself is an ego saving move.

I expect the biggest pushers of return to office, that also have no clear business need, are not doing well. I anticipate many backward looking reports about a large number of projects and businesses failing due to a lack of ability to adjust.

I WFH on permanent contract for one of the big ones. I never been at the office, I was recruited online, had my interview online and gotten about 4 months of training online , some more to come.

It works fine. I am more productive than in an office.

Equipment needed are provided and if I need anything I can just order it without much hassle, on the company dime of course. Knowledge is shared between everyone and all information is written down somewhere.

So why are they doing it this way? They get a bunch of well educated people from all over the world. Great pay for the job, not so good if I had an employment in my field.

But everyone are happy since they can WFH. The company get some really good people. At the same time they are forcing some back to the office in other areas. Because well realestate , but also because they didn't have the organisation in place before the pandemic.

The surveillance part is really not a hard thing for them to do, we are measured on all kind of things. I assume it's harder for them to do this in other areas.

And those are the ones they force back to the office and at tha same time weed out the ones who won't accept it.

Never going to the office again , I almost would accept a sale position over that.

Going back to in-person now would absolutely wreak havoc on my psyche bc no one at my company knows what I look like or what I actually do so I'd rather keep it that way

I know someone who works in IT at a place where they found that keystrokes rose 40% in office and significantly more work was completed as measured by story points. Keystrokes aren’t a great way to measure productivity, but it’s very suspicious that people somehow had to type less when they have to type to talk to anyone and often don’t have to in office.

It’s not perfectly scientific, but businesses pretty much never have scientific data to work with and the evidence they have says people overall are more productive in office.

The real answer is that people are more productive in the office with more oversight and build relationships with their coworkers that help them to do their jobs better. Companies invest thousands of dollars in "teambuilding" events that benefit the company and employees in no way other than to foster these environments. It costs their employees more time and money for transportation, which means they have to pay them more. They are not stupid. They are not trying to upset their employees just to cost themselves more money.

There is no other rational explanation. Any other explanation is illogical, as it costs the company more money to have and maintain an office building. It's just based on people angry about the fact that they have to leave home.