Can we please all of us stop being at the two extremes, office or remote, and accept that there are shades between black and white. The companies that will benefit from all this shift of mentality will be the ones that will adapt, allow remote work to those that can really utilize it and benefit from it and on the other hand bring back to work the ones that thrive in an office :-)
I'm in the automotive industry and apart from the obvious factory workers I cant think of a single group of colleagues for whom it would not be possible to work remotely. I also dont agree with the "software industry" asterisk. As long as your work is done 100% on a computer, remote work is more likely than not suited for you.
Don't take this as a toxic comment, but we're talking about taking away 1-2 hours of time of living and breathing human beings. Out of what? 6-8 hours free time? If anything, the employers should need to prove why remote work isnt possible. Anything else is damn near unethical.
I should add, that I'm blessed with a great union that allows me to cut my weekly hours, which I will do once I reach a comfortable level of income that suits my lifestyle. Which is to say: I really, really, really like spending my own time on myself. So my view on this topic is highly skewed.
And with all the side effects, particularly the crazy energy use to move people around needlessly, it's such a net positive for society to just embrace remote work.
I'm going to guess that, as an employer, you're doing something massively wrong to not be able to to trade 2 extra hours saved by the commute into at least equal productivity. Unless the work requires in-person & physical collaboration for a very specific reason, you're doing something wrong.
If you run a company it's your responsibility to decide for your company, taking into account your industry and team and such. Don't just follow trends or reactions-to-trends.
All the remote work success stories I know of are in software, law, consulting, graphical or video design/editing, or finance where one is dealing almost 100% with intangible things that can be transferred just fine in digital form.
Tesla makes cars. With the exception of the software team most Tesla work involves physical objects, and even with the software team it involves making software to operate a physical object. That sort of work is quite a bit harder to send remote. Factory work is basically impossible to remote and will remain so unless we get telepresence level robots that can be operated remotely.
Lastly I have to keep harping on a major hidden driver of so many employees demanding remote work: fucking housing costs in major cities. Remote work has allowed a ton of people to escape high cost of living cities where they are subjected to ever-increasing rents and are permanently locked out of homeownership without a liquidity event. I've heard multiple stories of people being pushed to return to the office in Silicon Valley only to retort with a demand for a 2X raise to afford housing.
Unless housing costs in these cities improve employers are going to have a hard time recruiting anyone who isn't straight out school in those places. You simply can't raise a family in e.g. San Francisco unless you are rich. The choices will be remote or to relocate the whole company to a more affordable locale.
Also IMHO means nobody should be building new companies in these cities unless they are going remote-first or remote-optional or are willing to pay 2-4X salaries... but the latter will only drive local RE higher. Build where it is economically rational to build.
Can you share what method you used to determine this? Has productivity dropped in a measurable way or is it something like the duration between when you send a Slack message and when they respond?
Maybe remote isn't the problem, maybe you are?
Building the culture and systems to support remote takes effort and belief that it will succeed.
And if you don't have the metric to back it up, you can't claim remote work is bad.
If you think you can't measure something, read How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busi...
I have worked in many companies, in several countries, from startups to a few of the largest companies.
Without exception, work in the office has been far more distracting than work at home.
Counting also the hours lost with commuting, in a day of work at home I have always worked about a double number of effective hours per day compared to most offices.
There have been only two places with a productivity somewhat approaching the work at home, and that was because every pair of engineers had their own closed office, well separated from the others.
Discussions with the colleagues from time to time can be very useful, but most of the real coding or design work is better done alone.
Sounds like you’ve been making the wrong hiring decisions, honestly.
But nothing. Least studied mass cultural/work change in modern history and apparently not worth any academics time.
As an employer I bet 'productivity' is your main driver.
An employee of yours would probably say 'quality of life'.
There was a reason for the office. As an employer I can tell you most (not all) workers are not able to properly contribute remotely.
Some jobs further require people to be together to properly collaborate.
Communication is already very hard already, and “Out of sight, out of mind” is a real thing.
I hope more companies insist workers come back to the office and end the madness of everyone demanding remote work.
In principle remote is doable but in practice most humans are easily distracted and we will be distracted.