There's another factor: their jobs are different. Obviously working in an office is advantageous if your entire jobs is meetings and talking to people. They're going to get frustrated when they are in the office and the people they want to talk to aren't there.
But it's waaaay less useful if you are a worker bee just programming all day. Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally. My wife found it astounding that pre-covid I would sometimes go into the office and not really talk to anyone all day. Literally would just be sitting at a desk typing; the desk could have been anywhere.
If you're somehow a FAAaaaang executive reading this, consider making RTO only mandatory for the people you directly manage and talk to, and then let them decide the policy for their subordinates.
So this is pretty much it in my opinion. Mangers collaborate with other managers and it’s much easier and effective to do this in person. A big part of the job is this. It’s how you align cross functionally and lots of serendipitous things occur because of this. It’s much easier to build the types of relationships you need to effectively lead.
Individual contributors in many cases do not benefit from this. In fact it can be an active hindrance. An ICs contribution and performance is easily tracked and captured through the outputs and metrics they produce.
I think the best organization will be one where leadership and managers spend a good deal of the week in the office. High ranking contributors (player coach managers, leads, etc) spend some so they can collaborate with other leads and leaders. And most ICs are optional.
easily the least productive days are when the team gets together for all hands. I'm sorry but people are going to schooze and dally and effectively write off that entire day from anything real getting done over the all hands meeting that takes up the bulk of the afternoon where like 2 people talk and everyone just looks at their inbox.
I'm just somewhere in the middle doing engineering management, so I'm already talking a lot to people in meetings, but I really enjoy doing it from home. Much easier to do something on the side or in between of all the none work related stuff (like cooking lunch). In half of the meetings we wouldn't be able to meet those people directly anyway with us being in different countries or even continents.
Not only are their jobs different, most of them have no understanding whatsoever of how the workers generate business value. The age of the technical founder is over.
> Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally.
Though I love a good whiteboard sess, a tablet with a stylus and one of many "interactive whiteboard applications" can also be pretty useful. Hard to have a whiteboard session good enough to compensate for the grueling traffic of most HCOL regions a good portion of us likely work in.
But it's waaaay less useful if you are a worker bee just programming all day. Yes it's still better to talk to people next to a physical whiteboard, but it only matters very occasionally. My wife found it astounding that pre-covid I would sometimes go into the office and not really talk to anyone all day. Literally would just be sitting at a desk typing; the desk could have been anywhere.
If you're somehow a FAAaaaang executive reading this, consider making RTO only mandatory for the people you directly manage and talk to, and then let them decide the policy for their subordinates.