Depending on how your company works, the short term positives could be nothing compared to the problems that will arise when everybody becomes an anonymous cog in an invisible machine.
When it comes to their core business companies have a decent belief in what it looks like.
Playing a little bit the devil's advocate here:
Risk aversion and general tendency to apply gradual changes.
Would you bet your company to run an experiment almost no one else is trying? Perhaps letting your workers work from home works perhaps you'll miss all deadlines and generate all kinds of drama.
An external factors kicked in and everyone was in the same experiment. Things were messy but not completely unmanageable. Some were even surprised things kept working as well as they did.
Now, the big question is: will this take a toll on people? Will companies that choose to continue with this work style be put in disadvantage as other companies switch back to on-prem?
Because it seemed impossible, until now.
>Key negatives are reduced productivity due to lack of supervision, difficulty of face-to-face meetings with clients, difficulty of training younger staff.[hard to measure]
Just throwing this experience of mine out there, when faced with actual dollar figures and hard to measure, vague outcomes, companies that I've worked for have nearly always acted on the dollar figures.