Purely anecdotal on my part, but I’ve noticed that while many people are able to effectively work from home and be as productive as they would be in the office, there are many employees who are terrible at working from home.
There is a decent % of people that do close to nothing while working remote. It’s not black and white, there are tradeoffs and it varies based on the person imo.
It’s why companies with the leverage to push for it (Apple and Amazon, Elon Musk companies) do so - they believe it to be an advantage.
I honestly don't know if it's actually better or it just appears better. Sure, there are times when fast communication is important, but as we see with Twitter lately it's obvious that rapid fire decisions sometimes aren't the best and while things seem very active and dynamic maybe it'd be better if communication was more considered and thoughtful. Isn't that why that whole "this meeting could have been an email" meme exists?
I agree the companies believe it's an advantage, but I don't know that it is. I don't know that they know it is. Leadership definitely thinks so, and there's a ton of institutional momentum that still hasn't shifted after the last few years, but I don't that it's actually empirically better.
Though I wouldn’t bet on it.
The real question there is: Are the minor issues associated with working remotely so bad that it is better to
force everyone to risk their lives on the roads every day (including in snow and other bad weather which exacerbates road death rates 100% purely because of employer demands to come in anyway)
destroy the environment with all of that unnecessary exhaust,
give asthma to their neighbor's kids,
harm parent/child relationships due to work schedules being out of sync with school schedules and work/commute demands leaving little time for parents to properly interact with their kids,
pass flu and cvoid around to everyone,
cause unnecessary deaths among their parents and grandparents,
drive up housing costs in specific areas causing homelessness as well,
and otherwise add layers of stress and unhappiness to every person's daily existence?
Or might it be better to just solve the few issues with collaborating in a remote work setup like we already did for the office?
I don’t care about the other stuff, imo it’s not relevant (putting aside I don’t really agree with your characterization). That said, I also think some of the issues are not so minor (remote is a lot harder for junior people starting out in their career).
I'd love to see what makes you think think almost everything that matters to most people for most of their lives is irrelevant to the question of how people live and work on a daily basis. Please elaborate if you will.
Since you disagree with my characterization, I'd also be happy to consider what you think I have misattributed there.
Overall the point is simply that you are not working with a steady state system here.
Whether one mode of working confers a competitive advantage probably has more to do with how much effort has been put behind streamlining that process. If that is indeed the case, then you might find yourself saying this about any change to any process that doesn't just wipe the market and create a whole new competition environment.
There's no good reason to throw our hands up and say there's nothing we can do to make one or the other situation work better, especially when the benefits are great, numerous, and include increased productivity overall.
For example:
“Are the minor issues of working in the office so bad that you’d force everyone to isolate devoid of human contact during a period of increasing loneliness and depression?”
“When you’d hurt a fresh graduates career prospects further cementing people already established in their careers in positions of power”
“By having people spread out instead of together we increase the carbon costs of supporting all these areas inefficiently instead of all in one place and that’s bad for the environment!”
Etc. Etc.
I find the useful way to discuss is to narrow in on the core issue (is working from the office an advantage or not) vs. ancillary effects that we can debate unproductively forever depending on who can rhetorically make shit up that sounds better.
Ultimately it’s this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
And ultimately if it is a decisive advantage to be in the office (not obvious to me, but I suspect it is in most cases) then the market will force it anyway.