A lot of times, when people discuss the phenomenon of employers ending work-from-home and try to make their employees come back to the office, people say that the motivation is to raise real estate prices.
I don’t follow the logic at all. How would doing this benefit an employer in any way?
Out of all the responses here, this is the only one that takes into account the actual psychological forces motivating the decision-makers.
The CEOs cannot justify their real estate expenses to their boards when employees are not filling those seats, and they likewise are contractually obligated to pay millions, hundreds of millions, or billions of dollars (depending on the company) for years to those lessors or lenders. There is a simpler motivation than “industrywide collusion and conspiracy to profit” - it is the motivation of these individual CEOs to appear competent and intentional despite that boulder they’ve placed around the company’s neck.
It isn’t a cross-company conspiracy. It’s each CEO’s personal but widely-shared motive to avoid embarrassment and their inability to adapt. Whether consciously or not, this is all those CEOs need to look at the “data” selectively and post-hoc rationalize RTO with platitudes like “increased collaboration and productivity” while ignoring the decreased morale, lost productivity from 2 hours of daily commute time, etc. It maintains the status quo that they assumed when committing to their property leases, and resolves any cognitive dissonance in the way most flattering to themselves (at the cost of their employee’s time, mental health, and personal freedom).