I appreciate this as a balanced take.
I’ve done a little work from home, and it’s nice being home, but it’s still work. If you’re doing your job right, it’s still your job.
Unfortunately, I’ve also seen that while some people are great at WFH and even do better, a lot of people either don’t get anything done, or look very “productive” because they’re harassing people still at work with meaningless busywork like sending emails that don’t do anything or asking other people to do parts of their job they’d be able to do if they were at work.
I think that partially goes to the point of “what is productivity?” since someone can look busy but not be doing anything that actually does anything positive for either boots on the ground micro views or mile high macro views. “Oh, look at how many emails got sent” great, did that actually help the business run? And sometimes the answer is “yes, and we should let this WFH worker continue at all costs”, and in others the answer is “No, and we need to get this person into the office or eliminate the position because either would be better than the status quo”
It’s a bit managerial in the way to look at it, but in order to justify WFH, the people working from home must be providing enough value to justify their employment, because too much overhead waste and the business ends, maybe every business embracing WFH ends, and then all that’s left is the ones that didn’t. To be clear, that’s not a moral stance, but a purely pragmatic evolutionary stance: Those things which survive continue and those that die do not.