If you're CEO of a company that's shitty to work for, you have to suspect that everyone except the middle managers and suckups is just phoning it in. Literally.
Edit: all you people taking issue with this are just preaching to the converted (each other). I'm talking about what CEOs think, not what actually is.
I worked at a huge company 30+ years ago (~300K employees). There was an engineer on our floor whose entire team, including his manager, had left the company in a short period of time. The company acted as if the entire team was gone, cancelling all their projects. He fell through the cracks.
Initially he sat at his desk all day reading newspapers and books, ready to do any work he was asked to do. Eventually he got bored and started up his own one-man business that he operated from the office. All the while he continued collecting a salary and benefits from the big company. This had been going on for two years when I left the company.
My manager and my skip level manager both seemed quite aware of what was happening. But this guy was in another division of the company, so they didn't think it was their problem to solve.
The lesson... for a big enough company, you can be just as invisible in the office as you are at home, but the office gives better plausible deniability.
You have never seen hours long discussions of Game of Thrones, Bachelor, sports, etc? Professional water cooler jockeys who transit from conversation to conversation to eat up the majority of work hours?
I once read a claim that all work is done by the square root of the total company head count. Honestly, that does not feel too far off from reality.
The claim is Price’s Law, originally an observation about academic publications in a field - half of them come from the square root of the number of contributors, now taken as a general MBA style business rule of thumb. One which joins nicely with evaporative cooling, the idea that the top performers also have the most skills and experience because they are working harder, have the easiest time leaving for another job because they are the most driven and have the better work history to talk about, perhaps the most contacts from the more work done.
And together, there is likely to be a big overlap between the most useful employees and the ones who have the easiest chance of leaving. Lose sqrt(employees) of people for any reason where they self select - e.g. cancelled bonuses, deathmarch project, austerity measures, return to the office - and it’s likely to hurt disproportionately.
Regarding. ..square root part I also find it intuitively true. Another way is to find people who most other need to reach out to during work, again that number probably come close to square root.
Walk around any office in Seattle or SF, and you'll see many people on Amazon, Reddit and YouTube as well... the only difference is they had to commute from Pleasanton/San Jose/Duval/Renton/etc. first.
Most of the people I know who shifted to WFH from in-office during COVID ended up buying places in cities outside of the "urban" radius, and now feel like they are randomly being forced back due to nth-order repercussions around overpaid pandemic hires and shortsightedness from executives who spent all of 2020-2021 remarking in memos how successful and wonderful WFH was for everyone.
In my opinion, it's not that people don't want to work in offices. It's that cities are hostile places for work, period. Companies can start by covering 100% of moving expenses, guaranteeing safety inside and around corporate offices, and offering in-office daycares/preschools for free just to start the conversation.
Forget about whether or not people are “working”. That’s just micromanagement.
There is either work not done, or work finished. If work isn’t being finished, then people aren’t working. If it is, then people are working. That’s all you need to know.
Have you consider alternative explanations such Yahoo! doing a stealth layoff by shaking off employees who want remote working or require it because they reside in a different metro area? IBM was infamous for shaking off headcount by requiring employees to move cities. Or management’s inability to measure performance so they resort to lowest common denominator methods like ending remote work instead of just correcting individual bad behaviors through discussions, PIPs, termination, etc.
When I worked at Yahoo during the mid-naughts, I had about 1 day of work a week, if that. Most of the other time my entire team spent playing video games, watching the stock market, getting food (food wasn't free at the time but I believe the smoothies were), etc. It was a bizarre environment and couldn't wait to leave.
I certainly admit the possibility, but if you have no way to catch that situation then you have bigger problems. Demanding RTO is a lazy and ineffective attempt to plaster over the gaps.
I'll admit it, some people don't work at home, or only work minutes a day. But I've known people that did the same in the office. What did Marissa Mayer do about them?
Marissa Mayer ended WFH at Yahoo for exactly that reason:
https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/25/technology/yahoo-work-from-...
If you're CEO of a company that's shitty to work for, you have to suspect that everyone except the middle managers and suckups is just phoning it in. Literally.
Edit: all you people taking issue with this are just preaching to the converted (each other). I'm talking about what CEOs think, not what actually is.