They don’t care, and they probably discount how much low morale lowers productivity - just how they’re over-estimating how much being in the office increases productivity.
It also doesn’t help that management at this level is surrounded by yes men (and women) who just tell them what they want to hear because they’re worried about their jobs as well.
They ignore the ‘vocal minority’ affected by these types of decisions and most other employees just keep their head down hoping to not get noticed and lose their job even though morale overall declines significantly.
AT&T has also ignored this, and ignored the impact on morale for people not having to relocate, the environment it creates is awful, the pace of all projects I’m on has been cut down significantly as teams deal with this and morale tanks. Most people are worried about updating skills, updating resumes, filling out applications, coming up with contingency plans, etc, instead of doing project work - as they see the direction the company is headed even if they aren’t effected by RTO and relocation. Worse still is everyone in a hub is affected by RTO and no one has had anything positive to say about the office experience. Productivity was cut significantly once all the devs were back in the office and had to deal with commutes, finding a seat, distractions, etc.
Company surveys are also useless as usually only happy people fill them out, as they aren’t really anonymous. Thus, people who are miserable tend to not voice their concerns out of fear of getting singled out and losing their job.
Upper management is in a bubble, true anonymous sites like this, and Blind are the only places to get a true gauge of how employees feel.