> yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).
Maybe, depending on the tasks. Also it depends on whether or not you take the view of the employee or employer. Say you work 8 hours a day (which even people in offices don't do) as the employer I do agree that you might get more done if people are in the office, but as the employee, I'll add my commute as well, so I now work 9 - 10 hours per day, part of which is completely unproductive. You also need to factor in that there is a shit ton of people who are fairly unproductive even at the office, they just look busy.
There are some fields where I can easily see the office being more productive in general, but you also have tasks where you move people for no reason. I think accounting is a pretty good example of a job that almost never require you to be at the office. Many companies even outsource this to other companies that most definitely isn't at the same office.
If you instead hired people to do a job, not be in front of a computer for 8 hours, then you could probably have an even higher level of efficiency. Imagine working from home, have a stack of assigned tasks for the day and be informed that once those are done you free to spend whatever remain of your eight hours as you please. I assure you that people will get shit done at light speed.
It's about management, and management mostly have not, and have no desire to evolve to handle work-from-home. You need better managers, more highly trained managers and managers that works harder than they do in the office, which many of them don't want to.