Why do companies want to return to the office?

it boils down to what’s in your contact, who cares if you are a great worker at home, you didn’t sign a wfh contract. People moaning about long commutes, is this the same commute you did 5 days a week before? Or did you foolishly choose to live further away from your office knowing wfh wasn’t in your contract?

More likely you have a mix of people in different jobs and roles all talking at cross purposes.

You're not working you're mentoring

But mentoring is working. It isn't captured by "KPIs" but it's absolutely critical to a company's success and to employee development. A huge problem for a lot of younger people who've spent a lot of their career working remotely is that they've missed out on that mentoring, even if they don't see it as a problem. How to function in a team environment is a critical life skill and you just don't get it sitting at home.

Whatever about bringing existing employees back, in my industry (pharma), almost every job being advertised now is for on-site work.

it is a perk yes, but then a lot of company’s at the moment don’t feel like it’s a perk worth fully offering. Maybe you are right but there has been a marked revolt against it in the last year.

“Maybe I'm an old fart stuck in my ways but a single phone call of 5mins can replace an email thread with 20 people cc'ed 90% of the time”

This and also I think people misuse Teams and email anyway - because the technology is there they feel they have to use it as the no 1 go to when in fact a phone call is easier far more productive and quicker - it’s when being in the office can help - you can ask colleagues questions and sort issues much quicker - I’m not advocating 9-5 5 days a week here but even once a week can keep relationships strong and get complex issues sorted much quicker

It's the whole, teams call mantra of saying things like "hi Flinty, how is the wife?" to everybody rather than just saying it once in the morning

wfh may b fine for established employees but it makes bringing on new staff very difficult and is bad for innovation. If your job can be done 100% wfh then it is likely to be replaced by AI in the next few years.

The most successful companies in the world havent invested in staff facilities, free food, engagement, loyalty, gyms etc. for no reason. It reduces staff turnover and increases staff loyalty. If WFH was more profitable they would not be making you go back into the office. Managers have to think about the long term strategic benefits to the company.

Very little innovation happens over ZOOM.

I think there's benefits to both. I work at a job that requires meetings and showing things. And during Covid wfh, the cycle time for the reviews that I do (which are tracked) were 1.5 times longer than pre-Covid in office. Something that I could have popped to someone's desk for & asked about instead took a few emails spaced over a couple of days. We do hybrid now as it's help cut down on travel but kept the essence there.

Office days are good for getting some of those interactions done not on a screen & getting updates as to what's going on in the office. I definitely suffer from Teams fatigue & can't deal with all the back to back on screen calls that took place during Covid wfh. I also like the separation of home & a work a little bit more so 2 days wfh & 3 days in office is good.

I do think it can all depend though on your own work circumstances. Even if all your team is in a different country (as was my case for over a year), it's still good to see the colleagues in the office your based & build those relationships. But if your job can primarily be done from home & your company is comfortable with that, maybe that's a 1 day week in the office to build those connections.

the amount of times I ask people for updates on stuff and they say - i've a quick call scheduled in with X, Yor Z and will get the update from them. In the intrim I pop upstairs and in 60 seconds I get the quick update that was waiting on a scheduled call. It's crazy the time that is wasted by people now accepting a culture of everything needs to be scheduled in.

Before covid we'd have regular client updates - once per month. Usually entailed one or two of us popping out to the customer for a meeting. Meet with the key stakeholders (one or two people). Since Covid and the scourge of teams meetings - we now typically have about 6 people from each organisation on the call that takes twice as long and is half as productive. Even requires a PM to take notes, minutes and actions. Stuff that was never an issue before.

I will take anecdotal evidence from my organisation with just over 300 employees - those who are in the office more often than not are better performers and make up about 80% of the internal promotions. Take what you want from this - but it is clearly evident where I work.

It's weird if you do that everytime you start a conversation with people you work with daily.

Its also weird if you only do that on teams and not meeting someone in person who you don't talk to regularly.

I don't buy the pension argument. Most pension funds are well diversified, and commercial property will be typically less than 10% of the overall holdings. Any drops in commercial property values are more than offset by rises in share prices over the last 4 years.

And why would an individual company decide to keep its own rent bill high in order to just marginally increase the value of some commercial property fund. It's highly unlikely that a company's pension fund is invested just in the property that the company is renting. That would be extremely reckless.

Doesn't make sense to me. Probably a company has long term to leases and penalties for leaving early. I expect just waiting to see how things developed before making a decision on buildings.

You're no claiming it's impossible to work as a team unless co-located.

I this typo was "not", rather than "now", because I certainly didn't say that. As someone who also works at home, it would be weird for me to think that.