They’ve actually seen a huge increase in productivity by moving to a virtual model during the pandemic — exactly because nobody is wasting 2 hours of their day waiting on elevators or waiting for meetings to start. People have more autonomy to block off their day and there aren’t the distractions present in a normal open office.
If I were to informally poll all of the product development organizations I work with, I would expect to see at least 90% of folks want to maintain the remote workplace going forward. They’ll still probably go back to some level of in-person work later this year, but the difference is that remote will still probably be the default for most folks. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to a model that assumes all or even most of the team is located in the same room — it’s just too much better to do things this way.
Trying to get things done properly is very hard if we could have even kickoff meetings with every one in the room and have printed designs stuck to the wall
And frankly most of the dev projects I work on are globally distributed anyway, so you’re never getting everyone in the same room to begin with.
And my current job quite often has multiple teams from multiple employers/agencies from multiple time zones - even being able to have key meetings with all hand present would massively speed up - we could have avoided so many problems and delivered things months quicker.