“Hell No, We Won’t Go!”

Companies are having trouble motivating employees to return to the office.

Photo by Ken Whytock on Unsplash.

From the home offices of the New York Times in New York City to the city government offices of San Francisco, employers are having trouble motivating workers to return to the office.

Efforts to require teleworking employees to return to in-person work have been met with resistance in many cases. In fits and starts, workforces have returned- if greatly diminished- only to be furloughed off to their home offices again due to rising community Covid19 numbers or new variants.

This continuing uncertainty, coupled with the rise of remote work tech, have led to changes in the nature of office work. Which of these changes are likely to become a permanent fixture in the workplace and which are likely to be curtailed by the pressures of the free market in a downturning economy remains to be seen.

Increasingly, the debate over remote versus in-person office work has left employees on one side of the debate and employers on the other. Office workers, perhaps not unexpectedly, have found they prefer to set their own schedules with less frequent direct oversight from their bosses.

Employers and corporate sales executives nervously watching plunging company bottom lines in 2022, also not unsurprisingly, have found they very much prefer the…