I wonder how much of this is a white-privilege thingy??? We need workers in the office, so that we can have do-nothing middle managers to watch over them???
I don’t think that is all there is to it and I do believe for some jobs you need an office environment. But IBM is demanding everybody come in three days a week, and there are surely a bunch of employees who could do their work remotely.
Notice the example of the employee quoted in the article that had a boss three states away.
My boss was two states away.
Going to the office accomplished nothing.
They had to measure me remotely—no matter where I was and no matter where they were.
Once a quarter we all traveled to HQ for a week to hang out together.
There was some real work done—but it was mostly parties.
I don't want make a sweeping statement, but I think one of the side issues right now is that many middle managers were let go a while ago. Perhaps not at IBM (though I expect so). The middle managers had already been identified as "dead weight" so they got hollowed out.
What that means -- is that the great mass of "worker bees" have little chance of moving up. There's no path to the top since so many middle positions are gone. So the "entry level" positions are now seen as dead-end jobs that lead to paychecks (which is nice) but do not lead to careers (which is what people want).
And although some middle management really was "dead weight", a lot of those folks actually knew how to lead a team, how to measure performance, how to manage a project. Good management is really critical and I think many companies decided to "save money" by getting rid of it.
Now they have "worker bees" at home and the companies can't figure out how to manage them.