In my experience, the efficiency benefits aren’t as clear-cut as you think. I have a client who is a big Fortune 10 company, with most of their engineering team

In my experience, the efficiency benefits aren’t as clear-cut as you think. I have a client who is a big Fortune 10 company, with most of their engineering teams located in the same high-rise office building for this collocation efficiency benefit. They’ve actually seen a huge increase in productivity by moving to a virtual model during the pandemic — exactly because nobody is wasting 2 hours of their day waiting on elevators or waiting for meetings to start. People have more autonomy to block off their day and there aren’t the distractions present in a normal open office. If I were to informally poll all of the product development organizations I work with, I would expect to see at least 90% of folks want to maintain the remote workplace going forward. They’ll still probably go back to some level of in-person work later this year, but the difference is that remote will still probably be the default for most folks. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to a model that assumes all or even most of the team is located in the same room — it’s just too much better to do things this way.