Here are some arguments companies make for RTO (return to office): Better collaboration, greater visibility, stronger communication, more connection and culture-building, ability to have a separate space...

Do you agree or have counterarguments for any of these?

I honestly heard that a lot of companies brought everyone back into the office to encourage voluntary staff reductions (encourage people to quit). When I heard that i was like that makes so much sense because coming back into the office has mostly meant chatting /video conferencing with my coworkers IN THE OFFICE lol. We barely meet in person (half our team is in a different office) and it's just totally bogus that returning to the office was to improve productivity.

I am so tired of this argument both for & against. Prior to the pandemic, many people worked successfully remotely and many people benefited from being on-site — this entire topic has strayed from allowing us to make a choice on how/where we are most productive due to biased fear, micro-management, expensive commercial real estate, and BS exe optics. Now we are closely monitored, forced into a weird totalitarian work environments, denied promotion/bonuses/terminated for not meeting unrealistic “butts in seats” mandates, and this level of micro-management sends a very strong message that we are not trusted, viewed as rational/professional adults, and ultimately this impacts both productivity and morale regardless what side of the RTO argument you support. This is not culture, it is control or at the very least, it is a growing culture of control.

None of these stand up to the argument (fact) that remote has been working beautifully since at least Covid (I assume that's when your workplace went remote). The reality is all these businesses are stuck paying for empty office spaces and don't like it. My last place ultimately decided to remain remote and ditched the office space. But many companies own the building/space and are loathe to just let it go.

Tax promises to bring x number of employees to an area. There’s no direct data to support anything else.

Much of it relates to a justification for the cost of the buildings. It’s great to have the choice but ultimately if you let people choose, treating them like grown ups, then you get the best response and people do their best work.

Remote work favors the introvert and in person work favors the extrovert. The reality is you need both types of people to be successful.

Introverts, throw you extrovert people a bone by participating in face to face events. Take a little time to talk and ask how people are doing.

Extroverts, throw your introvert people a bone by grouping your meetings and leaving 2-4 hour blocks of time open for people to concentrate.

I am required to come into the office 2 days a week. I have just about the easiest commute from a suburb to downtown you could imagine. I have a 10 min walk to the metra train station (heavy rail), a 20 train ride with a bunch of middle class suburban people, and a 15 min walk downtown. That is STILL 45 minutes. And when I get to the office, I sometimes don’t say even a single word to anyone actually there. I am in video meetings with people all over the country. It is a complete waste of 90 minutes of my time twice a week. We don’t have assigned desks, so I don’t even really meet people near me in the office. And even with all this talk of collaboration it is harder than ever to book a conference room. The whole thing is a joke. Upper management is starting to look at numbers. I hear some offices have VERY low attendance. We will see what happens next. I am quite sure 3 days a week is coming. But few people go in on Monday and Friday. So, we will all be there Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday? We reduced office space during the pandemic. Are there even even desks to go around?

I've been working remote since 2008 at a Northeast location. One per was in CT, a second peer was in TX, and our SME was in KY.
In 2019 I was given the choice to relocate to Durham NC within 5 months at my expense or leave. Durham was where the managers sat. I was eventually declared "surplus" and was able to retire-on-paper with 37 years service.
The work didn't go away - I trained my replacement in India. Most of the automation created to reduce headcount was sunset (no other programmers wanted to deal with maintaining it) and 2 people were added to replace me.
The point is that these companies are just unreasonable in their demands. Good people are leaving and they throw additional inexperienced headcount at the work left behind.

Counter argument: none of that is true. Provide actual evidence.

How about NO. And FU

90% of the time i went into the office, we had to be on teams meetings while in the same room. It was a waste of time. The only nice thing was having lunch with my coworkers, but we don’t need to go into the office to do that.

I've been fully remote for 7 years, and my current company is 50% remote...they have an HQ office 1000 miles from me. My team is scattered across the country and in 3 time zones. We work together great and are very productive. None of my immediate team work out of the HQ.

Depends on management emphasis. Where it's been studied, productivity appears to be significantly greater in work-from-home cases over work-in-office. So, WHY might management want to bring everyone back to the office?

One obvious reason: if people are MORE productive without first and second level managers breathing down their necks, perhaps third (and higher) level management might come to believe that they (the company) can do without do many first, and possibly second, level managers? So, self-preservation -- is, they see their positions possibly becoming "redundant" if they don't bring everyone back, so that they can be micro-managed.

If productivity improves, and there is no other overriding reason, why NOT remain remote?

N.B. I work developing software for real-time embedded software systems, and need expensive test equipment, and as often as not, custom hardware and clean rooms to do my job -- so I have to be "in-house" for AT LEAST 60% of project time (code and test phases), so my options for remote work have always been strictly very limited.

What I don’t see mentioned in these comments is the possibility that they are on to people working more than one job on the same clock? Just a thought!

Better collaboration --> this is a management style issue
greater visibility --> this is micromanaging
stronger communication --> need to tweak the comms with remote - but it's not difficult
more connection and culture-building --> this is the challenge, but can be done with good management and you attract and retain better people which leads to better products, companies and culture
ability to have a separate space - huh?

LOL NO

This is all about control and the ability for companies to write off their show-off $$$ office space.

It's tied to tax kickbacks, "efficiency" falsities, and boomer ideals.

RTO will die with the generation that thinks they can control every minute of their workforce's day.

All of this could be true, if not for the actual realities in the RTO push:
- Many offices downsized due to the pandemic, so there simply aren't enough desks.
- Field sales adapted to virtual/remote and had to stick to it because the customers haven't been hit with RTO yet.
- The cuts are happening anyway. Don't hit your 3x/week minimum, you'll eventually get cut. However, if you DO hit that minimum, you might get cut anyway.

A lot of this is a smokescreen to cover for tax breaks for companies who bring in their count of commuters for the office area, and the rest is simply killing the OpEx of headcount to spend on AI "solutions" that don't work.

RTO/AI workforce replacement is doing to workers what Cloud did to servers: Right now, everyone's rushing to switch to it, and when it doesn't work (because it takes effort to save money with any new technology,) the whiplash is going to be just as bad as all of the larger shops that walked back their cloud-first initiatives.

I worked for an international bank. I was one of yhe first to be brought on remote in 2022, everyone decided covid was over. Back into the office. My teams were in Switzerland, India and Singapore. When they reorganized, i was the only one in the US. Contract ended June 28. I never touched anything locally. Why did I have to drive 45 minutes for that even 2 days a week?