He’s not saying that everyone had lower productivity through the pandemic, but that those hired during the pandemic and working remotely had much lower productivity.
Another possibility is that he doesn’t know how to measure productivity in the new environment and the whole thing is sampling error.
Multiple years on from the widespread proliferation of WFH, I still see a large contingent of people who are completely unwilling to even consider that physical colocation brings something to the table that can’t be replicated online, even during onboarding where building that sense of social cohesion is most important, and a management style that would otherwise be considered ‘’micromanagement’ is more justifiable.
Ultimately it seems like people (on all sides) aren’t willing or able to separate “I prefer this” from “this makes me a better worker”. Don’t get me wrong. Remote work has its advantages. I say this all as someone that works remotely. But I also say this as someone managing a remote-first team.
Working online and communicating through slack & zoom seemed very natural to me because I've used slack/discord/irc through jabber/trello/mumble/ts3/custom forum software throughout my teenage years. Continuing that into working in an online-only environment feels very natural.
Some guilds literally have HR people that contact you when you first join to make sure you can login to the documentation (usually a mediawiki setup) and see the guides for setting up auth for all the services. They have been practicing onboarding people remotely for all of their existence.
2021-onwards was better.
This was not at Slack, of course, but I imagine every company basically was this.