Unless you notice that all your WFH are actually the good employees, and the in-office end up being lack luster sycophants that you do not want to promote. From

Unless you notice that all your WFH are actually the good employees, and the in-office end up being lack luster sycophants that you do not want to promote. From the POV of executive this is a nightmare. I have WFH a lot and never really had any issues with it and generally preferred it over commuting. But I did miss the in-office connection. Having taken a 100% remote leadership role, it hit me why all these executives are freaking out and mandating RTO. If your job is to communicate in the course of creating and changing processes to drive the company forward, then your job is easily twice as hard when everyone is remote. Sprinkle in a handful of offshore teams and... No one ever gets on camera. I and other leaders set an example and get on camera for every meeting, but most employees and contractors do not follow suit. So, I lose any body language communication from them, and if they can see mine, I don't get the feedback from that since I can't see them. Very subtle loss of information but it adds up to be huge. You end up having to pull everything out of ICs to get them to engage. It is fucking exhausting. Not only that, when you multiply this across the organization it obviously compounds and can spiral into a lot of uncertainty. Additionally, you are in meetings constantly where you are fixed in position in front of your station. For those of us on camera it seems to take a lot more energy than being in person, like you have to stage yourself since you can always see your image and you are subconsciously paying attention to it and adjusting. Contrasted with being in a meeting where you are in the room with nearly everyone at once where a matrix of (again) body language is constantly feeding information to everyone. All of that is lost. Even if we are all on camera I cannot focus on every tile and we certainly not making adhoc one-on-one body language connections as the meeting progresses. To the average employee, they don't care about losing all that if they can skip the commute and spend more time with their family. I totally get it, but for leadership it is soul crushing.