Comment by ghaff

In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.

I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.