Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.

I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.

In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag

This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).

And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.

Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.

Remotely joining an in person meeting is horrible. Joining a remote meeting from your desk is fine.