[mathewsanders]

Our company is mandating a 3-day in office starting soon.

I’m a bit of an exception because I’m in a city that only has a couple hundred employees, but when I do return to the office, it won’t be to collaborate with teammates: I will be joining zoom calls with people in other cities (which was my day-to-day pre-pandemic). Pre pandemic I would travel every 2-weeks to company HQ to be in-person for demo with stakeholders and sprint planning, but even then many people would join via zoom anyway.

I don’t think return for office has anything to do with productivity and more about anxiety around investments in commercial real estate.

[MBCook]

The few times I’ve been back it’s worse. Since everyone is on zoom meetings anyway, everyone is just talking all day long making it hard for the other people on zoom meetings at the office to hear what they’re doing. So productivity actually goes down.

All of which makes things worse for the people at home on the zoom meetings.

As soon as a significant fraction of your employees aren’t in office, it starts to become a productivity problem to force people to stay! Well, unless you gave everyone their individual offices with doors. But you can’t do that can you. Because then what would make the senior people special? So you have to use cubes so everyone can hear each other on zoom calls.