Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
It’s not about productivity.
It’s about control.
Guess who gets to work in private offices instead of the “productivity enhancing” open offices!
