On Elon Musk's Tesla's Q3 earnings call, he argued against the rise of remote work, asserting that people who work from home are "detached from reality." This perspective, contrasting sharply with his concerns about falling birth rates, paints a massive failure of leadership
It’s really about higher ups ability to control and police their workers, not actual productivity. There is a subset of management that really wants to be able to micromanage and tweak the working environment to “maximize” productivity, or create a “workplace culture” that suits their needs. Many justify their high salaries based on their ability to do so.
It’s also about other elements of control, such as being able to snoop on wether or not employees are trying to unionize, or if they’re looking for new jobs.
Ultimately people working from home undermine the relevance of management and lays bear some pretty damning realities about the effects of management on real productivity. The pay (in all forms) of management has ballooned along side the Financialization of the economy, and the trend of a working from home is a serious threat to these peoples influence and pay potential