This completely came out of the blue. I always knew that home office would end as soon as it started but this seems like a last minute decision from the senior leadership team. They are giving us two weeks to return to the office, there is no wiggle room or the ability for middle management to make exceptions for their workers (I actually really like my coworkers and lower management) and supposedly your on site attendance will be monitored by IT and there will be quarterly reviews by HR to discipline people who don't comply.
I work for a fortune 500 so I know that there are a lot of things senior management does for social engineering reasons rather than financial reasons. The weird part to me is how quickly it came. There has been literally no indication anything was changing from anyone, whether it be directors or the CEO. We even have these "town hall" meetings that are (ostensibly) to give everyone updates on what's going on with the company. We had one of these town hall's exactly two weeks before the back to work announcement came and the only explanation I have is they are sick of paying severance packages so they're trying to get people to leave or collect enough HR violations to fire them.
What's funny is the "official" story for why they want workers back is because of how much they value "face-to-face interaction" that fosters "team collaberation" but most of my team is out of state or out of the country and I haven't been able to do any face-to-face collaberation with them in 2 years because of budget mandated travel restrictions.
The real reason they are doing this is because someone who pulls the strings realizes there are too many workers who benefit from working from home and they want to screw it up for us because f-you that's why.
Most jobs are not like this, though.
and anyone who thinks a video call is anywhere near as effective as physically being in the same room for a meeting is delusional.
i've done 100% WFH for over a decade now and seen it every time.
With that said, the quality of a business goes further than employee productivity. If you are in a professional role, rather than someone doing grunt work, you are paid for what you know and the ideas you have, and less so for the work you produce.
If you set expectations for your employees with reasonable deadlines, and that's what you pay them for, then dragging them to the office isn't necessary.
there are very few exceptions to this (honest people and jobs that are easy to set a target for) but wfh is bad for productivity unless there is a system to track you the whole time.