Forcing your employees to commute to the office 5 days a week just isn't a tenable proposition anymore. Hell, even the 40 hour workweek is becoming less and less acceptable.
1-2 days a week is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to put up with in office bullshit and still get most of the benefit that comes with it.
What do you do about office space? The company is paying a ton of money to give everyone their desks. How do you handle the logistics of having people coming in on random days? Share desks? What if you both come in on the same day? Have unassigned desks? So you're sitting by random people? But the point of coming in is being with your team. But how do you coordinate that? What if half your team chooses monday/tuesday for their office days and the other half chooses something else? None of these are show stoppers, but I also can list a bunch more little "paper-cut" problems with the hybrid approach at scale.
At some point it's just fully-remote with an expensive office. I think those things will naturally work themselves out. But it makes sense why someone who's job it is to care will not know up front to solve it. I think the solution is to not try and solve it ahead of time.
At some point it seems we'll naturally converge on smaller office spaces with more OFFICES and less "open". Some people will always want to come into the office. Those people will be supported. Some people will never want to come into the office. Those people will also be supported. Teams will figure out what works best for them.
For me, I plan to work fully remote the rest of my career. And right now that's a sword I'm willing to die on. Do I miss some things about in-office attendance? Yes! So I plan to go in occasionally. I'll plan that around the schedules of people I want/need to see. Also, sometimes I just need a freaking shared whiteboard. And no, Draw.Io and digital whiteboards somehow just don't work the way I want.
Like you said, different people want different things, and it's likely that the most successful companies in the future will be the ones that figure out best how to find the sweet spot between maximum flexibility and maximum collaboration.
> I think the solution is to not try and solve it ahead of time.
Indeed. The company has been paying for the office this whole time. This is an opportunity to slowly decrease office spending over the next few years, not a logistics issue that needs to be solved ASAP.
It's hard to come up with something that's going to work for everyone.
Coordinate with your team and project stakeholders to all converge on the same week where you can collaborate and plan more efficiently. Then break and work remotely to actually execute.
Many small businesses won't even need to maintain a consistent workplace. They could cycle the meetups in more flexible co-working spaces as needed. Larger megacorps could still justify maintaining their own space that ends up being designed for more modularity and flexibility.
Leaving my wife home alone for a week every month to take care of the household by herself is not really feasible, I'd need to live close enough to commute if I were going to do that, so that kind of eliminates the chance to live far away when it's cheaper.
Except then you are geographically tied to a location.
I've been working remotely for about 10 years now, so well before Covid.
I now prefer to live in a low cost of living area, or travelling and working from places with a low cost of living.
As a software engineer, every single thing I do is timestamped, logged, reviewed, deadlined, etc ... so it's not like I can be lazy and slack off. I still have to work, I should be able to do it from anywhere.