Choice quotes for the tl;dr types:
"More than 90 percent of workers who can do their jobs remotely want at least some flexibility in where they work now, according to Gallup, and the ADP Research Institute found in a survey that nearly two-thirds of employees said they would consider looking for another job if asked to return full time. "
"...just 3 percent of companies said they would fire employees who didn’t show up in the office, according to a 2022 survey from Gartner."
'Most return-to-office experts share Tsipursky’s antipathy toward mandates, especially ones requiring workers to come into the office five days a week. “Mandates are a nuke,” Zach Dunn, a founder of the hybrid-work-technology company Robin, told me, “when a much less severe thing will work.” Top-down rules from executives make employees feel disempowered, and as the labor market remains strong — with nearly two job openings for every unemployed person — white-collar workers know they don’t have to accept conditions that don’t suit their needs. Business leaders have also tended to struggle with enforcing mandates because they don’t know whether to actually discipline people for defying them. “I don’t think the mandates have power,” Dunn says. “No one knows if they’re working or not.”'
'Many chief executives assume that being in an office makes workers more productive. But research shows that hybrid work doesn’t typically harm productivity. More likely, it helps, as a recent paper indicated that people put 40 percent of the time they saved from cutting their commutes back into work. There’s also prepandemic research suggesting that remote workers take fewer breaks. Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist and hybrid-work expert, who has been studying work-from-home data since long before the pandemic, tends to emphasize this data on hybrid productivity when meeting with business leaders. “Companies have this idealized vision that when people are in the office they’re working all the time,” Bloom says. “It’s a mirage. They’re not really working that hard in the office, and they’re working pretty hard at home.”'