I read several times about large companies forcing their staff back to the office. These companies lack trust, or they spent a fortune on their fancy new office, and it looks weird in the books if they allocate the cost of the office to only those who are actually using it!
The behavior is a simple reflection of the organization's culture.
If you think with that regulation you force the people to the office they will work, just check the canteen during the day! You can be sure people's time there will be appropriately registered in their timesheets!
You can go further in control freak behavior to implement such systems which register mouse movement, phone calls, and all keystrokes!
But even at this point, how can you ensure the work that they are done is smart work instead the hard work?
I think the source of the problem is rooted in two things:
Lack of confidence in what your people are doing or even understanding their work
You didn't select your staff properly
Both of these problems root can be found in yourself! Luckily these problems are not my problems, and I can write about them freely!
I'm happy with the change that I made 20 months ago. My company accepts remote work, as our senior leadership members partially work remotely!
This is different from home office work! They permanently work remotely! At the end of the day, can we communicate? Yes! Do they fulfill their job? Yes! Then what is the question?
I think this type of work environment gives us several advantages:
We can extend our operational hours without fewer out-of-office hours!
We can blend the cultural wisdom of our colleagues!
As we focus on international business - we can design products and services which fulfill broader demands than considering only one culture!
I can point to several others, the most important! We can retain the best talents independently from those situations that they experience!
Until more companies realize these concepts' value, we can move forward and build our future-proof infrastructure and services behind the scenes!
The future is open and distributed not only in IT but also in organizational culture!