I think that many people struggle at home (group A) while others don't (group B). RTO helps those who struggle at home (group A). And is a major inconvenience to those who excelled at home (group B) but it doesn't significantly degrade them.
Thus RTO improves group A performance while not affecting group B performance so it looks like a win overall and in a sense it is.
But it is penalizing group B, making their lives inconvenient, and increasing their expenditures.
Working from home is objectively better if your employees are in group B: (1) better for the environment [less transit], (2) leads to better work-life balance [no time lost to commute, more flexible work hours], (3) is more cost efficient [no need to rent offices in high cost areas, remote employees can be cheaper as their COL is often lower], (4) lets employees have better homes [because you don't need to be near the downtown core].
I think if you start remote and you measure performance of your employees, you can ensure that you get most group B employees and you can stay remote. The issue is if you started in the office, you have a mix of group B and group A, and RTO will improve the average employee performance, so it makes sense.
> I think that many people struggle at home (group A) while others don't (group B).
As someone who has worked remote long before COVID, there's another layer to this issue: Many of the people who think they are in Group B (work well from home) are actually in Group A (struggle at home) but they are resistant to recognizing it.
Prior to the pandemic, remote companies all understood that not everyone who wants to work form home can actually be productive at home. For some reason the pandemic WFH push made everyone forget that, and we started assuming that anyone who wants to work from home is good at working from home. Predictably, a lot of companies saw a huge increase in issues, panicked, and force every to RTO.
It's a challenging issue because the problems aren't immediately obvious. We had some very productive programmers who just couldn't WFH because they were hostile in text chat but very cordial in person. Others would spend entire works grinding away at problems in isolation that could have been solved with 1 hour of communication because they think WFH == freedom to isolate from others.
Many of these things can be trained out with good management and mentoring, but only when it's introduced gradually. The pandemic WFH push opened the floodgates to everyone, with predictable results.
I hope we go back to wide acceptance of WFH, however with the understanding that it's not for everyone. Some people can't handle it even though they like it.
Having gone remote in 2020, I’ve noticed similar to things to what you mention. Or, it’s almost like there’s a set of soft skills that develop when working from home. Writing styles change, and people speak/listen in a different cadence during videoconference.
Once you learn it, you can become very productive and endearing, but it takes time. It’s not for everyone like you mention.
This seems like a lot of conjecture without any numbers or facts to back it up. You assume that making Group B return to office won't affect their productivity, while making Group A work from home will. However, I know for me personally I'm far more productive when I work from home. I know I'm not the only one where this is the case. Forcing me into the office would drop my productivity considerably.
> Working from home is (1) better for the environment
Note that this is not necessarily true. US cities were for a while "NIMBYism vs mandatory commutes". To the extent that one is solved but not the other, we get more car-centric spraw. People commuting less can be offset with them doing more pleasure driving.
(Obvious this depends on the metro area, more remote work in Phoenix Arizona is definitely net good, in NYC not so much.)
Once we solve the NIMBY problem, I'll be a lot more comfortable with the society-wide implications of remote work, but for now it is reducing the impetus to solve a problem that needs to be solved anyways.
Thus RTO improves group A performance while not affecting group B performance so it looks like a win overall and in a sense it is.
But it is penalizing group B, making their lives inconvenient, and increasing their expenditures.
Working from home is objectively better if your employees are in group B: (1) better for the environment [less transit], (2) leads to better work-life balance [no time lost to commute, more flexible work hours], (3) is more cost efficient [no need to rent offices in high cost areas, remote employees can be cheaper as their COL is often lower], (4) lets employees have better homes [because you don't need to be near the downtown core].
I think if you start remote and you measure performance of your employees, you can ensure that you get most group B employees and you can stay remote. The issue is if you started in the office, you have a mix of group B and group A, and RTO will improve the average employee performance, so it makes sense.