So a new hot take in our company is that “people are more productive when they're in the office” and one of the arguments which was made was that “people socialize during the coffee breaks and talk about their day to day issues which cause overhead, and this benefits the company as it allows people from different teams to understand what are the problems in day to day operations and thus the software can be improved to reduce the operational overhead”.

I'm personally against returning, I love working from home. I don't have to commute, it's way cheaper etc, the usual arguments. However, the argument the company made has stuck with me as in my personal experience, if i'm speaking with colleagues who have become friends of mine, it's often great to hear about their issues about working with the product i'm responsible of, which gives me some sort of idea on how to improve it. Scaling it upwards and speaking with people who are more like acquaintances or just random colleagues, it becomes exponentially more valuable.

Now, for me, this seems like a good enough reason from the companys POV. I'm not married to this company and I earn none of the profits, so to me it's an annoyance, but I haven't seen this argument brought up before in this sub and other discussions about remote work. What are some other thoughts about this? Is this argument good enough to get people to return to the office?

So a new hot take in our company is that “people are more productive when they're in the office” and one of the arguments which was made was that “people socialize during the coffee breaks and talk about their day to day issues which cause overhead, and this benefits the company as it allows people from different teams to understand what are the problems in day to day operations and thus the software can be improved to reduce the operational overhead”.

I'm personally against returning, I love working from home. I don't have to commute, it's way cheaper etc, the usual arguments. However, the argument the company made has stuck with me as in my personal experience, if i'm speaking with colleagues who have become friends of mine, it's often great to hear about their issues about working with the product i'm responsible of, which gives me some sort of idea on how to improve it. Scaling it upwards and speaking with people who are more like acquaintances or just random colleagues, it becomes exponentially more valuable.

Now, for me, this seems like a good enough reason from the companys POV. I'm not married to this company and I earn none of the profits, so to me it's an annoyance, but I haven't seen this argument brought up before in this sub and other discussions about remote work. What are some other thoughts about this? Is this argument good enough to get people to return to the office?