> All this is to say, I'm skeptical that workers won't be called back into the office as soon as leadership gets the chance.
That forget the leadership on top of that leadership though!
Where I work, before covid they were working on expanding quite a bit the amount of office space but as far as I understands, all theses plans got cancelled and instead we won't have permanent desk and instead we will works remotely 2-3 days a week. That's coming from a company that had literally no remote works before Covid (except while travelling).
It represents so much money to have less office space, as long as the manager doesn't play too much with their staff efficiency during Covid, it will just make sense to save money there.
Working from home 2-3 days a week is not what I would consider "remote work," since you'd still need to live close to the office.
From my perspective, this is worst of all possible scenarios. Employees are still shackled to an expensive city, but now they must pay for housing that supports a dedicated "home office" space (e.g., a larger apartment with an extra room, or carving out part of their living room/bedroom). This is just shifting the cost burden of real estate from the company onto the employees.
I disagree. If I only had to come into the office, say, once or twice a week (3x might be pushing it) I'd be willing to live much further out because I'd be willing to tolerate a horrible commute if I only had to do it a small percentage of the time.
For example, in Austin, these days anything located within a half hour of downtown tends to be horribly expensive. But just go a little beyond that and house/real estate prices drop precipitously. You're going to see a boom in these exurbs as these "mostly remote" jobs increase.
That forget the leadership on top of that leadership though!
Where I work, before covid they were working on expanding quite a bit the amount of office space but as far as I understands, all theses plans got cancelled and instead we won't have permanent desk and instead we will works remotely 2-3 days a week. That's coming from a company that had literally no remote works before Covid (except while travelling).
It represents so much money to have less office space, as long as the manager doesn't play too much with their staff efficiency during Covid, it will just make sense to save money there.