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I see a lot of “good” answers where good translates to reasonable business or social goals. But I can think of quite a few bad reasons. The top reason is, management wants workers back in the office because managers never learned how to manage people, so they practice management-by-walking-around, aka interrupt-driven behavior. Many companies have a culture of MBWA, and it’s a hard curse to break. Another bad reason is, distanced work has led to a substantial reduction in workplace unfairness behaviors such as sexual harassment and race-based favoritism. And this, logically, has made female and minority employees more valuable and better performers. But in many workplaces, favoritism is the order of the day, and women and minorities were not the favorites. The favorites are now performing worse than the people they stepped on to be unfairly promoted, and it makes incompetent executives look, well… incompetent. Another reason is that many people, particularly executives, have more authority, respect, or control in the workplace than they do at home. For quite a few people, their office has become their primary social outlet. And taking that away has proven unlivable for them. The other reason that immediately came to mind is that executives are, by and large, older than the rank and file, and they (we) come from a time when building, maintaining, and overseeing an office space was both a critical part of the job and a source of pride / ego. For older management, offices are still a real-world manifestation of the success of the company that signals to other people how effective the leadership of the company is. People are less able to derive the same sense of awe from abstractions like sales numbers. If people don’t return to the office, it will not continue to make economic sense to have flashy offices, and this ego outlet will disappear. Are these good reasons? They are not. But these reasons, honestly, ring truer to me than “hallway collisions.” In the real world, all motivating reasons are self-centered reasons, and executives simply don’t benefit from hallway and breakroom magic or mentoring of the young. They do perversely benefit from showy offices, discrimination, avoiding overt displays of their lack of skill, and forced social conduct, though. |