(2021) WFH seems a little less productive maybe:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/are-we-really-more-produ...(2021) "developer productivity was stable or increasing at Microsoft and elsewhere post-COVID.” (Still, 30 percent of the company’s workers who were surveyed reported lower productivity during the pandemic.) More recently, however, Microsoft researchers concluded that “firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts.” . . . In the case study of the Chinese company, published in 2015, productivity went up 13 percent among those who worked at home. In the U.S. case study, employees who went remote — this, too, happened before the pandemic — saw their calls per hour increase by 7.5 percent, a healthy boost to short-run productivity. . . . But in both studies, the probability of being promoted for the remote workers roughly halved relative to people who worked in person — suggesting serious long-term consequences of remote work. In the U.S. study, for example, 23 percent of on-site workers were promoted within their first 12 months of work, while the remote promotion rate was 10 percent. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/24/working-ho...
(2023) WFH makes newbies 18% less productive: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515
Everything I see is it's either a slight increase or a more significant decrease. You could argue everyone's in cahoots with commercial real estate barons, but it seems like the data backs RTO, from a "productivity" standpoint.
