How are you doing so?
It's also likely that if the productivity losses occur only in this 25% of the time that you're not "heads-down" as you say, then they could be explained by bad company culture/process which could be worked on, for an easy productivity win across all teams at the company.
If you could provide this data it would be very helpful, as it would be the first hard data that I have ever seen showing any kind of productivity loss from being remote.
We all feel more productive, management might feel we are not. It brings me back to my original point. Management holds the cards and their “feelings” will outweigh the workers in the debate absent of hard data from either side. The workers need to provide the evidence that makes it indisputable that WFH works better. If your company is doing an RTO, you workers have failed to convince their management that WFH is measurably better for the organization.
This argument presumes that management is rational and 100% data-driven, which in some cases I’ve seen gets a big fat [citation needed] from me.
My point was really more that worker perceptions of their productivity increasing are just as subjective as management’s perception that productivity is decreasing. It’s all just a “feeling”. HN wants to stay WFH because they are more productive and want management to provide facts when they want to RTO, but the workers cannot really provide data to support their claim any more than management can.
I don’t have hard data as to why, but right now my best guess as an explanation for my team is that we see ourselves as more productive when we are head down and cranking, and we are. But outside of those moments, we are not as productive, but we don’t perceive that we aren’t. Unfortunately my team are only heads down about 75% of the time and the productivity losses we feel are happening in that 25% of time and we just don’t notice.