https://www.axios.com/2022/06/05/work-from-home-elon-musk-remote-office-meetings
More trash articles aimed at c-suite readers to reduce worker work-life balance.
By “empirical data”, as they often do, they
-conflate overwork with remote
-point to the issue of weak-tie relationships declining. That seems legit, but lacks historic perspective. My sense is that weak ties have always been weak, we just never cared to notice before (i.e., it's only a problem now and only as a rationale to get workers back into offices). many weak ties probably aren't needed at all, so their decline could be a positive, from a business perspective. Plus, as with nearly all complaints about “remote”, weak ties could be strengthened by simply doing things a little bit differently (tactics that can work remote).
-position zoom fatigue as some unknowable problem inherent to remote work. Zoom fatigue is fairly well understood at this point, and so anyone legitimately concerned about the issue can look to the research for actual solution. It's pretty easy. Fewer long meetings, larger breaks between meetings, etc.
One thing I've really encouraged for our internal cluster leaders is always looking at the actual data and methodology of these 'analyses'. There are major financial impacts of reducing remote work flex, not to mention the fact the pandemic is ongoing, and do we want to ever make those kinds of high stakes decisions based on no data and sensationalistic market noise? We might occasionally, but leaders generally want to feel like they use a sensible decision making process.