Atlassian have proven (along with a load of other companies and academic studies) that forcing people to work in an office is an anchor on productivity.
CEOs that are forcing their employees to come back into the office are willfully pissing away productivity.
That is arguably negligent from an investment perspective
Exactly. Employees are not cookie cutter duplicates. The more productive ones always have more options, even when you treat them all the same. This is worse for the company than firing people randomly.
I suspect that this has nothing to do with productivity for most companies. I'm not smart enough or really concerned enough with why CEOs are massive assholes to look into this - but I figured it has to do with other stuff like property.
If you own a building and rent out space to cafes and gyms or you charge for parking etc there's a lot of incentives to get your little cash cows back in the building.
Right but the company that owns them likely owns the property or is its self owned by another company that also owns a company that owns the properties these people work in so it's super important for their overall profits to keep these buildings filled.