[Mezzie]

Commercial real estate often operates under multi-year leases, so companies have property leases anyway, they figure they might get some use for it. Other than that, the pressure mostly has to do with the networks/social circles that those higher up in companies run in. Local governments have historically worked hand in hand with companies to make their locations good places for businesses because they benefit from the increased foot traffic/population/tax base. Now the two sides (companies and local/state governments) have competing interests and the heads of companies are being pressured and wooed pretty hard to get people back into offices.

If you're an executive and have a choice between pissing off your employees (who you view as fungible) and pissing off people in your network who could make your life/the life of your company more difficult, the obvious answer is to piss off your employees. If local and state governments can't depend on office workers for $$, they might need to start doing things like raising corporate tax rates or stop giving companies incentives/grants/exemptions. Basically in person is worse for the company's long-term bottom line but it's better in the short term for the people making the decisions. What does the CEO care if the company takes a hit in ~5 years? They won't be working there. They do care if they have to start paying more taxes or explain to the board why all of a sudden they have to start paying expenses that previously were offloaded due to agreements.

That's my read on it anyway. It's a fascinating social problem wherein the interests of the higher ups and the interests of the company as a whole are at odds.

[izacus]

> That's my read on it anyway. It's a fascinating social problem wherein the interests of the higher ups and the interests of the company as a whole are at odds.

Well there's plenty of readings like that, but there's very little evidence they're actually _true_. They're just stories told around fires about evil gods depriving poor workers of wfh.

I see plenty other (often misguided) reasons why managers keep pushing for RTO, but "my companys office space, oh egads" is almost never one.

[Mezzie]

I mean to be fair, it'd be nearly impossible to get evidence one way or another given we're discussing the true motives of people and those are impossible to objectively verify. I don't think there's any shady conspiracy, just incentives that are aligning in weird ways and that in most American companies worker satisfaction is something that's pretty easy to let fall compared to other factors. I also don't think that the managers etc. are doing this on purpose: I think it's a case where the publications they read and the members of their network they listen to want RTO and they trust the words and interpretations of business publications and the people they meet with often over those of their employees.

Knowing the 'gods' are stupid rather than evil doesn't change 'acting in their own interests but not the interests of employees/the long term health of the company' problem. Why are they buying into these misguided reasons? Because it benefits them to do so. Why are they listening only to the RTO side? Because those institutions are more trusted by the decision makers.