For what it’s worth: I’m at a company that did survey employees on this question. The results actually leaned toward return to office for a lot of the non-engineering parts of the company.
Within engineering, the more junior people really wanted to return to office. The people with 10 years of experience and 2 kids at home really wanted to stay home. Not surprising, really.
Our engineering team remained remote, but not everyone is happy about it. I get emails every other week asking engineers to not come into the office very often because we don’t have enough extra desks for remote employees to be in the office very frequently.
> Did you care to ask your employees what they think? Why not?
While I do think it’s very important to keep employee’s desires and career goals in consideration, questions like these aren’t necessarily aligned with what’s best for the company or getting work done. If you survey employees about how many hours they’d prefer to work each week or how big they want their next raise to be, you’re not going to get answers that reflect what’s best or even realistic from a business perspective.
That doesn’t mean you can ignore your employees desires, of course! But you do have to keep in mind that most employees will default to responding with what’s best for them personally, and for a lot of people from the general population that can mean something very different than what’s best for their team or the company.
you're wording implies that they didn't ask at all, especially the "why not" at the end. Yet I see nowhere in GP's comment that would allow you to make that assumption
sorry typing early in the morning it was a "I realized" and then a "we decided" e.g. someone in pretty much every company needs to come up with an idea and then socialize it and get by in... We got buy in as "we decided" to unify the days we work together and we work remote... I feel like maybe in this forum i've offended someone for sharing - apologies, just thought in this context sharing our experience was interesting for maybe others...
My company gives everyone the option to be remote or hybrid even if they're near the office. Probably most of engineering comes into the office at least once a week if they're located near it. My whole team tends to come it at least once a week and a few almost every day. That said if it was 3 days a week I think my team would not be happy and I definitely would not be happy.
