I’m pretty sure employers are paying a lot more for workers to be in office than for them to work from home. The commute would be a tiny fraction of the electricity office space and other costs they pay for workers to be in office.
In comparison, lets imagine someone already making $80k/yr, a 40-mile heavy-traffic roundtrip commute taking 2 hours (1.25x time) and adds $10 in daily gas... That's about +22.5k in costs.
So yes, in direct math it's probably not as big, but having a physical office probably satisfies other hard-to-quantify priorities of corporate executives, such as personal prestige, sense of control, and how things look to investors.
[0] https://blog.naiop.org/2018/05/top-trends-and-metrics-to-wat...
[1] https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/wa/se...
If employees are happier and more efficient working from home, it satisfies the priorities of all the above parties. If RTO makes people unhappy and either less productive OR makes them not want to work for that employer, it goes against the incentives and priorities of all the above parties.
I agree, I added a correction because I think it's off by a factor of 12 due to month-vs-year price quotes.
That also means the office-rent cost is significantly less than if the employer began paying for employee commutes.
[3] https://www.squarefoot.com/leasopedia/dollars-cents-much-cos...
All CRE listed as price per square foot are per year prices.