I just want to be able to choose which I want on a day-by-day basis. Some days I am much more productive in the office because I need to, say, communicate with a bunch of people or there's some sort of back and forth that needs to occur. Or I just need to get out of the house for a bit. Other days, I just want to stay home and spend the time focusing on something in particular without being bothered. But I need both to have both to do my job effectively. However, I work at a small company and am the primary software engineer which changes the dynamic a bit.
Forced-hybrid is just using a sledgehammer on the calendar rather than providing the flexibility that is actually liked by optional-attendance-office.
If the staff actually find this face-to-face time valuable, they'll organize and go into the office themselves, personally I've had zero requests from anyone to do that outside of explicit team-building activities.
In the before times, "Is there a Zoom for this?" was a live question. Zoom fatigue, such as it was, did not dominate working life. Savvy collaborators anticipated when a conversation would demand more than Zoom, and they made judicious use of the public transit between our offices to keep things smooth.
My enthusiasm for RTO is not about changing the venue from which we take our Zoom calls, but about changing our relationship with Zoom to something like its pre-pandemic state. To have some conversations naturally again. But there's no getting around that the WFHers would have to either show up or be excluded from them.
I personally find Zoom excruciating, and I blame the transition to remote meetings for all communication for turning a once optimistic and joyful career experience into a miserable slog.
