I've read one of the easiest ways to break moral in an office is to simply take away the snacks. Forget nap pods, or walking desks- don't touch my clif bars!!
For me this is indication of cost cutting going into effect. This means it's time to stop riding a dead horse and to start looking for a live one.
Yes, that’s why companies prefer lay offs rather than broad base salary cuts. Lay offs are a temporary hit to morale, while pay cuts are more permanent. Moreover, in lay offs, you can fire least productive workers, while after pay cut, it’s the most productive that will leave first.
A pay increase is a > 10 year commitment, in the eyes of the accounting department. Where I am, it's usually around 60% base cash bonus, %30 base RSU bonus, for "above average" performance (which isn't difficult). I, unlike most of my colleagues, budget my life around my base pay. I experienced the 2007 recession, so in my mind, this is all unsustainable and will crash someday.
From what I've experienced, there's a double whammy here. Only the talented folks remain, but they all know better than to stick around, so the company dies shortly after.
Maybe for a little while when there are lots of jobs offering WFH and competing for a small number of people switching jobs. However if you invert that by having lots of jobs simultaneously require people to come back into the office and lots of people simultaneously seeking new employment, then that job hop is likely to be quite difficult. At the very least, most people probably won't be able to line up a new WFH job before they either need to start going into the office or quit and risk extended unemployment. In the long run there will be more WFH opportunities than before the pandemic, but a lot of people are going to have to go into an office whether they want to or not.
You have to ask yourself, why this is the case. And the simple answer is status quo bias. Many dream of a different life, but few will actually pull the trigger on a major change.
However if a company suddenly changes an established working relationship, then all bets are off the table. If people have gotten used to WFH, and now you make them come into the office, then you’re invalidating the status quo bias. Switching jobs is probably less disruptive to their status quo then going back to the office.
Corporate managers are forgetting a very maxim. Never piss off your employees by taking away something they feel entitled to. It’s the same reason that it’s virtually unheard of to cut salary, even when revenue is collapsing in a deflationary recession.