The reason CEOs want workers to Return To Office is because they want you to quit

The main thing I don't get is that the top talent at your company are the ones that can easily find another job instead of putting up with your BS. The people that aren't competent enough to leave on a whim are the ones you're going to be keeping.

That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.

I'm not going to quit or return to the cubefarm. These coprophagous donkey molesters can fucking well fire me and pay unemployment.

It isn't, it's all the office space they own, if people are allowed to keep working from home the retail office market will crash pretty hard.

Copying my reply from another similar post -

I would lose my control over my minions... Why don't you understand?

Whoops, I meant, my staff can't be monitored...

Whoops, I actually meant, I will lose the one place in life where I can actually throw around my power...

/s

What if I don’t return to the office and also don’t quit?

Middle manager here: they want you to quit, and me to do your job plus the jobs of the other 3 who just left after you're gone.

Or maybe…

CEO 1: “Our plan to force everyone back to the office isnt working. They’re just quitting”

CEO 2: “Ok new narrative, convince them it was our plan to get them to quit, and keep forcing them to return to office.”

Still seems to me the idea of "if people don't come back into work the real estate market implodes" is the most convincing.

Commuters vaporizing and countless city blocks losing their purpose will cause huge upheaval in the real estate market.

And turns out a /lot/ of CEOs have a vested interest in keeping the real estate market artificially propped up.

Thus, they try and force people back to work as hard as they can.

It won't last, the big companies that don't give a shit about real estate due to being even bigger in scale will out compete and the international market will absorb most of the workforce.

If you shackle your success to real estate, then you can't compete with international megacorps that saw this coming awhile ago. Prepare to be acquired.

Hey who knew that the best way to make money as a company is have very few workers and be an amazing talker that can dupe others into investing into your pile of shit. Oh wait, Holmes, Neuman and Bankman-fried already came up with that business model. The innovation on that model is just don't get caught.

Whenever they talk about "Business Innovation" this is the crap they are talking about

Or is this op-ed 3D chess reverse psychology to get you back into the office?

There's an often overlooked part that you could call the "extrovert factor." There's always plenty of coworkers that thrive in group settings. Some number, maybe most, middle managers are extroverts, and when forced to work the way the average minion does, they suffer. It's why they became middle managers in the first place. Their productivity suffers in isolation too, so when converted into a wage slave, they can't complete with less extroverted people. Unfortunately they're better situated to promote their own success, getting by in people skills while more competent people get screwed.

Extroverts also seem to suffer in productivity during WFH, even if they aren't managers. They are stuck in a situation that hurts their functionality, offsetting the statistics. If they actually broke down WFH productivity by job description, I suspect that the extrovert/introvert factor will be a huge determiner of productivity.

Optional office hours seem the best fix, but the corporate attitude of obsessively monitoring the workers to be sure they're not wasting time and therefore money is another factor that makes these companies want to favor their preconceptions. The confirmation bias kicks in and then we have to listen to them focus on it.

Some work from home dude cheat the system to work 2 full-time job at a same time. Not anymore. Well done CEO.

I thought my employer wants me to come in is because a lot of my work is hands on. Kinda hard to debug an electrical problem remotely.

Hopefully the hybrid model is here to stay. I actually prefer being in the office. The only negative of going in for me is the commute.