If you don’t know whether or not your employees are in the office and your business is running as it should, then you don’t NEED your employees in the office. A return-to-work mandate serves no purpose other than making life harder and with no tangible benefit.
That being said, wouldn’t it just be easier to monitor VPN usage to see who’s working remote?
Everybody is taking the stupid bait and arguing the wrong thing.
Companies don’t think it makes them more efficient, they don’t care about culture much, but they do care about layoffs.
This is stealth layoffs. You get x% of people to outright quit because of the mandate. Another y% you can “fire” for non compliance with the “return to office”
And then your layoff is a TON cheaper because none of those groups require severance, and it plays better with everyone that still works at the company because the layoff is smaller or non existent.
Then you go and hire cheap wfh, or pay expensive contractors from another business owned by a CEO in your company.
Every time one of these companies equates productivity with presence in the office it becomes more obvious that they have no clue what kind of work their employees actually do for them and how to check even the tiniest bit of their work output or results.
I really wouldn’t call this going all out, if you have a unique identifier to unlock, open, or login to something, someone else is tracking it; that’s one of the reasons it exists.
“If you use a fob, it’s on the log”