80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

That's an unfortunate thing with how businesses operate. They shouldn't have to look like a fool in front of their board. Executives are not psychics. I get that their job is to foresee things like that, but sometimes you just.. can't.

Having everyone work in the office all the time was an accepted norm that everyone was ok with. Nobody (really) saw this coming and if they did, everyone would've thought they were nuts. If the CEO decided "hey let's try WFH!" they probably would've been removed by the board. So it's pretty unfair for the board to be like "this guy's an idiot for not trying WFH in the past!"

They could play it off as "wow turns out we were wrong about WFH, this is going to be great in the long term! Right now here's how we might use that extra space" - they could detail things like improving retention by bringing back private offices for people who want to work in the office, subletting the space, and other things.

My brilliant manager still has his home office day during team meeting. So the whole team sits with headsets on their desks and talks to the manager who’s sitting at home. That’s how return to the office plan works for the peasants. Good that I am leaving soon.

I understand the merits of WFH and in-person work. One thing that is however funny is the guilt tripping used by employers who have this straw-man version of a lazy WFH employee, and more so, employers who have a delusion that their workplace is important enough that people need to sacrifice a large portion of their lives just for the opportunity to be there in person.

90% of jobs aren't people's "passions" and have no chance at becoming some big world changing venture. Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world. People just work because they need to. Claiming that WFH is bad because you can't bounce ideas off other employees and get into the real world-changing "deep work" is silly because that's just the employer overvaluing the importance of their company. Those companies do exist, but they're in the minority, and employers smart enough to have founded/run those kinds of companies usually are smart enough to see the merits of a hybrid policy.

In that situation we would use a meeting room. The dynamic would make the manager feel like they are the outsider in that case, though.

> they could detail things like improving retention by ... subletting the space

nope, that's actually the root of the problem, nobody else wants to be in the office either so the commercial real-estate market is in slow-motion meltdown for the last 3 years. even if you fervently believe that WFH is the better path, you simply cannot exit your commercial real-estate investments right now without locking in big losses.

at the landlord level the game is to simply let the office space go vacant rather than write down the notional value of the property (which is going to be based on X years of rents, and if you lock in a lower rent value you just dropped the value of your investment). But at the tenant level if you want out, it's not like you can just find someone else to sublet your space either, because the building is full of unoccupied offices already. Nobody wants to sign a deal that realizes the losses that exist on paper.

So instead the move is to force everyone back to the office so it looks like there's value being generated from the property, as opposed to a white elephant standing empty, which is effectively what it is. And yeah, middle managers and CEOs have every incentive to push for people back in the office from their own ends too... the feeling of power/control and the facilitation of their own communication-focused work as opposed to the output-oriented work of the actual ICs.

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Anecdotally, my current employer has had some weird communication mis-steps where my manager clumsily relayed some "we really want everyone to be at the all-hands this month, in-person if you can!" and it came off as more of a "more layoffs incoming" tone when actually the problem was more that this was boardroom politics around being seen to be using the expensive building we just bought a couple months before the pandemic started. And this is a company that is all-in on remote work already, we have people everywhere (I and another coworker are at least 4 hours from the closest satellite office) and we're nearshoring some junior roles etc. We will never get everyone into an office because that's not the strategy, but even we are not immune to the "we bought the building and can't exit" politics.

Last employer, same thing, but they are going all-in on forcing everyone back to office... despite having hired a bunch of people remote during covid for a project. Since the project crashed I guess they dropped all the contractors and are hiring from a bodyshop, and I guess maybe they're doing local hiring for that. But between IC turnover due to the project being a shitshow, and heads rolling in the team leads due to the project failure, and dropping all the people they hired on remote since COVID... I think they basically turned over the entire team that existed pre-covid minus like three people. So they are starting from (almost) scratch anyway.