It’s not about about money: corporate would spend more money when you’re in the office.
It’s not about productivity: shit has been getting done from home and then some, for literally years.
It’s not about team building: productivity requires focus, open space bullshit floor plans hamper that and most everyone is gonna wear headphones and try to block out the background noise and social distractions as much as possible.

It’s about control, power and obedience: butts in chairs are reassuring to managers who have no fucking clue what they’re doing, nor what you’re doing, nor what the company needs done.
Management usually has no idea what anyone is really doing, they’ve never figured how to measure actual productivity, so they equate butts in chairs with productivity.

I don’t work for Ubi, but I’ve been the one remote player of an in-office team for the last 15 years.
Nobody ever cared where the fuck I was working from until after covid, where suddenly some insecure execs fear we might all be wanking all day, probably because they think we’re like them.

I’m perpetually busy at work, mostly because we’re understaffed, but I know what needs to be done and I do it.
I don’t need a babysitter to do that.

Them? They’ve always been useless, but now it shows, because there’s no-one to boss around, shit still gets done, but they’re not around, so they can’t delude themselves into thinking their bullshit is what makes things work.
Since they no longer have anything to do, they fuck around at home all day.
Faced with their uselessness, they pull a Seymour Skinner… it’s everyone else who’s wrong and not them.
They extrapolate and think that if they’re fucking around, surely we’re all doing what they’re doing and thus need reigning in. They fail to realize they’ve never had a productive purpose even before.

It’s all just a symptom that your management is full of old useless farts.

Some manager usually chimes in with some remote lazy bitch they “caught”, as if these people didn’t exist in the office.

Having been the outsider remote guy since way before, I can say the rest of my team fucked around a lot more when they were on-prem than when they’re remote.

If everyone just… didn’t go back at all, what are they gonna do, for everyone and close the whole studio?

Would promises of supporting 100% remote work be considered to be verbal contracts?