I honestly think it comes down to this in the majority of the cases.
"Look, we have a two-years contract where we pay X thousand dollars a month for 100 desks and we have on an average day 3 developers in our office. After one year of lockdowns, we know our developers work at least as well from home as from the office, but higher ups ask us why we pay so much for an empty building, so we will force you come back to the office as soon as we can, even if we don't save any money with that and most likely decrease our efficiency and employee satisfaction."
I live in Germany and that's more or less what's happening at my company as we speak. Nobody complained about our performance or said they wished the company would enforce "work from office" rules, yet, they already try to slowly increase the days where we need to work from the office.
In my opinion, once a month in the office is great for chatting and connecting with people, but when it comes to work output, it doesn't move the needle, it's actually a day lost to the business.
There's another aspect here, too. Companies get tax breaks to put offices in certain locations, and those tax breaks are frequently based on having a certain percentage occupancy.
In government situations, the space itself is at a premium (not what it costs). If your org has a certain amount of space for use, other orgs will try to steal it from you. The amount of space you control is an indication of how awesome your org is.
There was this one org that had a few floors of a building for their use, but most of the desks sat empty most of the time. This came to the attention of a different org that was hard up for space. That had 2 people per desk at many desks. They got the "space manager" to take a look, but the target org got wind of what was going on and they called everyone to be in during that time. Those floors were overflowing with people when the space manager showed up.
"Look, we have a two-years contract where we pay X thousand dollars a month for 100 desks and we have on an average day 3 developers in our office. After one year of lockdowns, we know our developers work at least as well from home as from the office, but higher ups ask us why we pay so much for an empty building, so we will force you come back to the office as soon as we can, even if we don't save any money with that and most likely decrease our efficiency and employee satisfaction."
I live in Germany and that's more or less what's happening at my company as we speak. Nobody complained about our performance or said they wished the company would enforce "work from office" rules, yet, they already try to slowly increase the days where we need to work from the office.
In my opinion, once a month in the office is great for chatting and connecting with people, but when it comes to work output, it doesn't move the needle, it's actually a day lost to the business.