If I were on a team that truly needed face to face collaboration, real whiteboarding, real in person meetings, then fine. That’s not the reality for most teams here.
Even if everyone were in the same building, the tech work has been largely offshored and US developers were laid off years ago. There are no face to face meetings to be had. You’re still on Teams calls all day, just now from a noisy office instead of a quiet home.
It makes no sense. It’s expensive. It’s bad for the environment. It destroys work life balance. It worsens traffic. It exhausts people. And for what?
Where are the metrics showing any positive impact on the bottom line? Where is the productivity data? Where is the retention improvement? No one can produce any of it. Because it doesn’t exist or shows the contrary to what they want you to believe.
If anything, this policy is costing the company money while actively making employees’ lives worse and driving new hires out. That’s not leadership. That’s stubbornness disguised as strategy.