I’d point to all team / guild / corp based online games and almost all OSS as counter examples. I’ve worked in remote or distributed teams all my career. What you refer to is an emergent reality and what you’re used to. It doesn’t make it invariantly true, and there are so many obvious counter examples of highly effective teams and organizations that are socially robust and incredibly more productive than corporate organized teams that it’s hard to take seriously that collocation on a daily or even regular basis is crucial for anything other than management feeling in control and people feeling comfortable that things haven’t changed.
Reality is metrics over 2020-2022 don’t show a decrease in any aspect of productivity. As such, once the passions have cooled, companies will have a real uphill battle demonstrating corporate real estate expenses, which can be a significant percentage of expenses and capital tie up, are justified because “I suspect” and “I feel” and “our corporate culture” and all the other vague hand waving in the face of hard numbers.
Reality is metrics over 2020-2022 don’t show a decrease in any aspect of productivity. As such, once the passions have cooled, companies will have a real uphill battle demonstrating corporate real estate expenses, which can be a significant percentage of expenses and capital tie up, are justified because “I suspect” and “I feel” and “our corporate culture” and all the other vague hand waving in the face of hard numbers.