Now I'm back in an office doing 9-5, and everything is a chore. My stress levels are significantly higher than previously, etc...
With tools like group video calling, conference calls, email, Slack/chat, etc... It's incredibly easy to stay "close" with your team while being remote.
But if you can work remotely from home/desk, so can people who are willing to work for 10% of your salary. In person means "Im on the radar, im there to consider, and there to help". Someone over a chat client doesnt have the same presence.
Now, this might/probably change with the advent of AR and VR workspaces.
That's just capitalism. Choose a profession where you're not so easily replaced by someone who will take 10% of your salary.
If you're so unskilled as to be that replaceable, there's no reason to feel comfortable in a non-remote job, either.
Just take a software engineer for example. LOC is fallible in too many ways to take seriously. Number of function points coded? Number of bugs fixed? They are all very fallible.
How about mentoring? How about reviewing code? How about documentation? How about professional development?
Depending on the situation, reading a technical article can weigh higher than a support issue. How do you develop the weighting for the different factors? Can it be applied across organizations?
To confound it further, people tend to take on work that doesn't fit their title. The smaller the organization, the larger the diversity of responsibilities.
Then there are soft factors like knowing which issues to address immediately in order to keep them from percolating up to your manager, working well within a team, communicating effectively, etc.
My opinion is that we are unlikely to see objective, effective measurements of productivity for the Tech Industry anytime within my employment life. It's not a failure. The number of factors involved, not to mention the ability to gather the measurements, is staggeringly complex. After all, we're not factory line workers producing pre-defined widgets.
Depending when you were out at the pool, I can imagine you got a few instant messages from your boss that you didn't reply to.
That's the thing. Over the last 10 years the vast majority of my colleague, client and bosses were in remote countries. I worked with a guy that was the only one in the office for his team. His whole management hierarchy, all his colleagues where in other countries. Still management insisted he needed to come to work, wearing a suit as it was the standard in that office. (note that there were not even anybody to "see" that he was there, I guess the only reason is that remote working for permanent employee is quite difficult in the UK: you need a home office assessment, the company need to provide specific stuff, ...)
I'm curious what sort of company insisted on that.
To be fair, I worked for a company previously that didn't provide facilities for remote working as a general rule (i.e. access VPN that existed for sales), but I still had 1 colleague in my team that was working from home full time (i.e. using the VPN).
So I guess it must be random.
I may be the exception though since I was 'trained' in remote work starting with my very first job out of school. Even though I had to go into an office, many people I worked with were somewhere else in the US. The majority of them I never met in person and mostly either emailed or spoke on the phone.
I will say though, the hardest remote work situation to manage is an extreme time difference. Managing people in Asia while living in the US was tough.