I'm also a big fan of being able to work from home a couple of days a week

Partial work from home is ridiculous. They fully admit that it isn't necessary to be in the office but at the same time still want to have some kind of control. So they settle for this not at all a reasonable compromise compromise.

If you want to go into the office fine that's your prerogative, but I don't think it's fair to pretend there's some kind of justification for it.

Ah, so you're the guy who vomits every little thought into the office when your teammates are clearly trying to concentrate on other stuff? You have email for a reason bro

The arbitrary n days a week requirement is just a simple lazy way of ensuring people visit the buildings consistently so there is a valid reason to keep them paid for. It will also continue to be n+1 until things return to as they were or peoples investments are no longer going to benefit with more forced return to office.

Face to face meetings can be organised anywhere. Its just inefficient to be using a building and requiring people to travel for what does mostly amount to sitting on your own on teams calls anyway. The requirement to have people sitting in places where you occasionally bump into them just smacks of bad management.

In person meetings can be useful for improving social relations. Mandating n days a week on the off chance you might have a useful meeting is asinine.

If only some kind of communication system existed that allowed them to communicate from the comfort of their own homes. Sci-Fi nonsense I know.

My team resolved this by using the plethora of collaboration tools at our disposal.

We have a chat that goes all day, every day. At times, we have breakout chats for specific work projects.
We have a tool that lets us collaboratively project manage, centralize our files, and document organizational knowledge.

I would move hundreds of miles away if I didn’t have to come into the office once a month to make an out of touch leadership feel better.

about getting people in one place for management’s sake

oh no dude, it's exactly about this. and commercial real estate prices.

make no mistake.