Am management, can confirm. I preferred the office for personal happiness reasons, but seeing the sustained high output [0] during WFH, why would I risk messing that up?
(I don't stop people from going in to the office of course, I just don't push them to, and the company has told us "do what works". I just started going in one day a week, and it's been nice. We will do a week-long in-person gathering later this year and include the remote folks we hired since covid.)
[0] Yes, high output even when normalized for various factors that were dramatic early in the pandemic, but are tapering back to a new baseline, like people not taking vacation, or working longer hours because there was nothing else to do. Yes also, my team reports many downsides to being distributed. But the sustained net output is high, and we're hiring great people twice as quickly.
(I don't stop people from going in to the office of course, I just don't push them to, and the company has told us "do what works". I just started going in one day a week, and it's been nice. We will do a week-long in-person gathering later this year and include the remote folks we hired since covid.)
[0] Yes, high output even when normalized for various factors that were dramatic early in the pandemic, but are tapering back to a new baseline, like people not taking vacation, or working longer hours because there was nothing else to do. Yes also, my team reports many downsides to being distributed. But the sustained net output is high, and we're hiring great people twice as quickly.