1. To make sure the commercial real estate industry doesn't fail
2. Because it would be made obvious how unnecessary most middle managers are

Edit additional bonus content:

Many economies have the daily commute factored in. Think about how industries like auto, oil, road construction, fast food, etc... Would be affected if everyone worked from home.

There is no why; you are trying to explain irrational behavior with reason and logic. And so by leaving you contribute to the downfall of irrationalism in business. Bravo!

Soft firing without having to pay severance. That makes their quarterly numbers look better, which in turn makes stocks and thus their compensation package go up.

Of course it will probably kill the company in the long run, but by then the board will have elected a fall guy to blame and they will all jump out with their golden parachutes, leaving the rest of you to burn.

I think it's a variety of factors and a lot of decision makers failing to view the picture holistically (optimistic view) or just being malicious (pessimistic).

1. A lot of top level decision makes are very aware of the costs of things. Knowing exactly how much money a large office space costs and constantly coming in only to see it very empty makes them want to see it used more.
2. Face to face communication is better than the alternative. Full stop. That said, you can get like ~75% of that by just turning the camera on. I think a lot of places should just consider encouraging people to use their cameras more.
3. The executive mindset is probably that people goof off less in the office.
4. If you want to lay people off, forcing RTO is a good way to get people to leave voluntarily.
5. There's likely a sense of "the way things have always been done" being inherently better in the minds of some executives pushing RTO.

I think ultimately it's short sighted. I think companies that actually are facing problems with WFH (and not just being malicious) should try to address them in different ways instead of just killing it off.

Just started a fully in office job for the first time in years. The job market is shit and I've got bills to pay. Planning to leave for another WFH job ASAP.

No joke honest to god it is actually a conspiracy, the land value in cities started to plummet so the governor started going around making not so veld threats about keeping people in office and the corporations wanted to work in the cities so they complied ... For now money always wins it will just take longer.

It's because leadership is a heady cocktail of stupid and selfish.

I really want to stress stupid. That means they draw bad conclusions from facts.

Sometimes selfish is a factor. They have an obscure reason like "my share value goes up because we get a kickback from the city for staffing an office here". They don't care if it's bad for everyone else or the company long term. They'll get their money and then leave.

Working from talking to a customer that works in same industry, but they have to go to an office to just talk on the phone and do exact same job as me. Fucking stupid. Corporations are dumb as hell.

The people running companies no longer understand what the companies do.

This is actually an escalation, when I was younger, the people running companies understood what the company did, they didn't understand what anybody working for them actually did, but they did know they were building airplanes or filling tax returns.

Today, the Epstein class has completely disconnected and random idiots are now in charge. Look at Nadella at Microsoft, that guy has been filtering everything he hears through copilot for two years now, you think he knows fuck about shit?

Terrible company then.

Every enterprise level org I've worked for has had strong rules about not engaging after-hours.

They understand of you're working after hours you're going to be useless the next day. Consistency is more important.

Presumably you get an on call rate factored into your pay.

Do you get paid for being on stand-by? If not you're being robbed.

Have your own rules?

Wife doing the same with her job. Did ADA for WFH and they claim RTO is a essential part of her job because of oversight. But she WFH 1 day a week before covid and then 5 years during covid full WFH and then they decided to demand 2 days a week in office so still 3 days a week WFH. But they need those 2 days of oversite? She 100% works from Teams, nobody she works with is in office as they are contractors. Lawyers have been contacted.

For the curious (like me): ADA = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990

It strikes me as mastubatory to take a discussion about working from home and making it entirely about how important you are compared to the common clay of your company.