The fact that they have to resort to checking logs to determine who is coming into the office should be enough proof of how pointless working from the office is.
If you literally can’t tell without a literal in/out log, you can’t claim performance or communication as reasons for requiring it. You’re literally saying “we can only tell if we check the logs.”
It’s not about control, it’s about billions of dollars having been invested in commercial real estate.
But, they would save billions of dollars by selling it back. This is textbook sunken cost fallacy.
People keep claiming this this, and yet it does little to explain hmthr large number of smaller companies that have no real estate holdings.
Also, it totally overlooks what the actual purpose of money is to the wealthy, namely control. It’s not money for money’s sake, nor is it control for money’s sake, but rather money for control’s sake.
Meanwhile, WFH is a big shift in worker autonomy. Many employers have treated employees working from home with extreme suspicion, going so far as to accuse us of theft just because they can’t directly watch us sit at a desk. They installed computer input trackers on remote hardware, they got belligerent over the idea that people maybe - just maybe - they were doing laundry or soemthing on company time, and they’re nettled over the idea that people were sitting on their couches.
This isn’t the behaviour of people concerned about their stock portfolios, or of landlords upset that their renters may not renew their lease in 5 years. These are not rational actors making rational decisions about long term consequences. These are people who have lost their fucking minds over having given up just the slightest, insignificant amount of control over their employees lives and, importantly, having handed it over to those employees.
They’ll happily take a productivity hit, a revenue decline, or even a massive loss in institutional knowledge if it means clawing back these miniscule gains in worker power.
And if we’re lucky, it’ll cost them significantly more control over workers in the long run.
