Companies are made up of people, and people get things wrong. A great example is working from home - prior to the pandemic many companies refused to consider it. They didn't believe it works. They refused to trust their staff. They thought the IT issues would make it unworkable. It was only being forced to try it that made them understand that it's actually really good for many people. So much so that lots of companies continued to do it, and recruited people remotely because they don't plan on stopping it.
It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.
Good question and one way to approach it, for sure. But it appears paradigms shift in waves. Running a business means focusing on the most important things for that business. It’s likely that things like these are microoptimizations.
For instance, there are many companies that have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to enable permanent remote work even post-pandemic. It would have been a massive recruiting improvement to have had that pre-pandemic. (And it was, I worked at a place that was like this). But in the end, it was better to just focus on the business itself. There’s only so many things it’s worth not standardizing on.
As someone who prefers both in-office and more than 40 hrs of work, I find this whole thing interesting
It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.