I work from home and my boss frequently says he doesn’t mind us working from home but always follows it up by saying he really misses seeing people “sitting in the seats” and “working in the office”. It really is a weird ego trip, being able to visually see people working for you. Actually getting the work done is secondary to the power they feel of seeing their subordinates toiling away.

This was obvious. Actual work involves focusing. WFH encourages me to focus more. The office is a distracting and annoying place to be.

What's even more stupid about return to office is that we know that commuting is a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. So working from home would not only be an improvement in work conditions, sparing millions of individuals hours of wasted commuting time each week, it would also be an easy way to reduce pollution and mitigate global warming.

Laws should be passed that mandate employees can work from home whenever it cannot be demonstrated by the company that being on site is absolutely necessary to do the job.

I think it's a bundle of factors why so much of management has turned their backs on WFH the last few years, but ego is certainly one of them.

My personal theory is that work-driven extroverts are typically those in management and executive positions. It's not shocking that they'd be miserable having empty offices. This is especially so for those where the majority of their professional careers have revolved around networking and climbing the ladder by knowing the right people.

Regardless, it's all been extremely frustrating to witness. I'm extroverted at work, but I loathe going into the office more than one or two days a week. I try to keep my social life completely separate from work, but I've known countless people whose primary socializing revolved around their job. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, some job fields just naturally tend to foster more camaraderie than others due to the nature of their work (e.g. odd work hours, extremely demanding work environment, etc). I just despise it when those who desire it and are in a position to force it on other workers do so.

but controlling bosses don't care

...have they ever? This is par for the course.

Acting like its surprising that they'll literally ignore the data because it's about control is absurd, this should be the least surprising finding there could be.

My personal theory: boomer bosses are intimidated by new tech and don't trust it.

I used to work in a place that sank its head office with an increased RTO mandate. Working conditions and pay were already quite bad and the increase in office hours led to turnover rates as high as 95% in some teams.

In the end they had to outsource a lot of their finance roles.

Employers don't see reduced employee expenses as value. HUH.

Oh look, a Business Insider article in contrast with the 857 pro-RTO ones they released over the past 2-3 years...

Jokes on them, I can work just as unproductively in an office as I can from home!
/s

Eat shit, office complex moguls. Get a real job.

everything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back

In my experience, this is more or less the case. At this stage, RTO vs WFH may very well be the dividing line between a company having bad management, and genuinely good jobs. But the determining factor is really people and culture - so choose wisely.

In the few times I've done WFH in my career, the through-line has been working in a "high trust" environment, with people that do not have a dim view of humanity, and do not fleece their customers. The opposite of all that was also true for office-based jobs I worked in between those.

Wasn't this the cover story of Well, Duh! Magazine way back in 2021?

In other news: water is wet

Rto = return to office