Work Reform

This is a conspiracy theory. For this hypothesis to be true, it would take all companies and and real estate companies to cooperate. This is something people are likely to believe because it is an us vs them theory. But in practice they are incapable of doing it.

The problem is that real estate companies and lending companies have competing interests. Real estate companies want people to go back to office, obviously. But other companies would save loads of money by going full remote. The current lease is irrelevant, because the money is already lost, and it won't be recovered if people go back to office. The sunk cost fallacy is not a fallacy any decent company will fall for. People though will easily believe they do, especially when they are not protecting themselves from it.

My hypothesis is that management and direction are controle freaks who cannot trust their employees. They are also aroogant. This leads to a situation where they will attribute any productivity benefit during remote work to their skills and decisions, and they will attribute any decrease to employee lazyness when they're not closely monitored. They want to correct this by bringing people back to office to appease their mind. There is reaction to change too, obviously, but I suppose it simply takes the shape I described, the shape of distrust of employees.