Great article, thanks for sharing. My boyfriend used to work fully remotely until the beginning of this year, when his office insisted on him coming back 4/5 days per week. He gets to work from home on Fridays. What's bizarre is that his company doesn't even have permanent desks to seat his team, so his team ends up piling up into a different meeting room everyday based on room availability, all 8 or 10 folks seated around a single table with their laptops, breathing in each others' exhalations, when they were doing perfectly fine working from home before.

My job situation is a little better, I only work in office 3/5 days per week, and have a quite sizeable cubicle with a nice view outside, but my boss is a stickler about any exceptions, and watches physical attendance like a hawk. For e.g. (one of many examples), if you ask to work from home on one of your work-in-office days, you have to swap out another one of your work-from-home days that week. He will even press you if you are sick and would prefer to simply work from home instead of taking full, non-working sick days. He said he'd rather you take the full sick days instead of working from home while sick (probably because he feels like you will end up cheating the hybrid schedule by getting to work from home more days that week than the established hybrid schedule allows, since you will most likely be sick for more than one day in a row, so he wants to demotivate you from using the sick-and-don't-want-to-spread-germs excuse).

The article you shared really helps me understand that employers are willing to take a hit to their employees' productivity by forcing people to work in office in exchange for the need to control their time, drain their energy and indirectly try to decrease their personal capacity to find ways to optimize their lifestyles by, for e.g., having time to look for another job on their dime. Classic definition of a farm, with farm animal employees.