[sfjailbird]

Not to mention the trend that had long been going on, to make the office ever more impersonal, with increasingly more open floor plans, hot desking, having to move your stuff in and out of lockers at the start and end of the workday, etc.

WFH should be the ultimate dream of these companies, they can finally get rid of those pesky meatbags and their 'emotions' altogether.

[isilofi]

Yes, but unfortunately sometimes no. I've also seen a rush to get along with less office space but still have all the people come in, e.g. with hot-desking and an early-morning desk lottery at the gates, huge soulless open-plan offices (but at least the shared desks are wiped down twice a week now, hurray!). Yet attendance at the office was still mandatory, even if your team got a seat 3 floors and 200m away somewhere else in the building (because they had to bring kids to school and didn't get their pick at the desk lottery).

So management wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. Everyone in an ever smaller, ever more unusable but supposedly cheaper office. Concentrate all the smaller offices in the suburbs into one huge big-city campus, making the commute a nightmare. But people have to be at their desks, or else. Remote was officially rolled back.

Unofficially, even middle management wised up and just ignored the back-to-office mandate, because they wouldn't know anyways who was in and who wasn't.