First, execs stroll into the office and often have a pampered experience. Reserved parking. Admins ready and waiting within earshot. Special executive areas which are quiet and nicer than their homes.
Execs work is often collaborative due dealing open-ended problems (e.g., strategy), or they require specialist help (e.g., let me talk to VP Legal or the CTO about this idea).
But they forget that the majority of the workers who actually get work done think meetings are a waste of time.
Second, as a manager myself, it's very rare that my peers or above actually care about leadership. They might take some baloney leadership course, but do they take leadership as serious as other parts of their job? Do they continuously work on it? Nope. They just think leadership is telling people what to do.
If they can't visually see their workers, they don't know what to do. Their management toolbox which only contains a punch clock not longer works.
These RTO moves are likely a mix of executives looking to reclaim their kingdom, backdoor layoffs, and maybe some financial move related to real estate investments or something to do with taxes. Unfortunately I'm not an expert about how companies manage their tax burdens with regards to real estate purchases or leases but these decisions seem to be about personal importance (for the executives) or some hidden red ink that isn't related to productivity of the work force.
I work in an environment where even before the pandemic we were very flexible with working hours and working remotely. It was weird going more remote at first, but as restrictions eased up, we just naturally shifted back to the flexible regime. My guesstimate is the average work from office days fell from 4 to 2-3. For some people it's still 0 or 5, and it's fine. A lot of the people first came in during the remote times, how would the office make them more productive if it would mean completely changing your habits?
More junior people tend to get more benefit from the in person experience, being more remote means you have to adapt your approach in dealing with them.
I also don't buy the argument of people working less from home. It's just as easy to not do the work in the office. It's actually easier to hide behind a wall of busywork in the office than at home.
I guess large anough companies have to set rules to avoid feelings of it being unfair, but offering the flexibility and choice is a huge benefit which some newer up and coming companies could exploit.
Personally I think the objective benefits of remote are far too great for in-person working to remain the norm. Same wage level to an employee imparts a much higher real income through efficiencies... no need to pay for transportation, can live in an cheaper area, can optimize for lifestyle rather than proximity. Can integrate foreign teams more easily... though still wouldn't want to have radically different timezone members in the same team.
Remote requires a different management style, which I feel many of these companies haven't really adapted to. Either a sufficient amount of work gets done, or not. It's pretty easy to measure depending on your business objectives.
I agree 100% that the cultural element tends to be lacking in a remote context. People feel much less attached to the company and more willing to shop around/job hop on a whim. In a way this is good for the broader economy. But I've also found with a change in management style, it's possible to keep the in-office culture feeling alive in a remote setting. Team group programming, quarterly events/meetups, more regular 1:1s, peer 1:1s.
I do wonder what the primary metric driven motivation is for a lot of these large companies doing RTO. Is it to prevent higher attrition? Is it a shadow layoff? Is it expected to produce more work/employee? (and to remain competitive, it would have to be to a greater extent than the cost savings with remote)