This will be counterbalanced by the fact that WFH is better for many employees from a work-life balance perspective, so higher-performing employees who have more choices will tend to gravitate toward companies that allow WFH.

I expect many companies will arrive at an equilibrium with at least 2 days WFH for focused work and 3 days in-office for collaboration. This seems to already be happening since the % of companies offering hybrid is up this year. The question is how many great employees laggard companies will lose before accepting that.

(Caveat: this does not apply to companies doing mostly ground-breaking work that have more mission-focused, highly qualified applicants than they can handle. Some companies may be surprised to find they are no longer in this bucket.)

Or the opposite - companies with the most draconian and rigid RTO mandates end up with high attrition. Anyone who can work anywhere else does so, and the company becomes a collection of misfits over time.

Currently the hard-RTO companies in the news are clearly doing it for silent layoffs reasons as there are simultaneous leaks of 5-figure attrition targets.

Maybe a strong FTC/DOJ stance on antitrust, plus the top-down mandates will lead to more small company innovation as well.

> Unfortunately this can be a race to the bottom

This works as an argument against 8h work day and 5-day work week too.

Ultimately if something is better for the society (and WFH obviously is - commute time, carbon footprint, land prices, housing crisis - it helps with almost everything) - we should just force companies to use it by regulation, so that there's no "race" in that regard cause the conditions are the same for everybody.

The exact regulation is tricky, but sth in the spirit of "if your job can be WFH you should have an option of WFH" is a good starting point.

> companies with wfh are driven out of business by those without

This is unlikely. Notice the parent post said:

>> I don't care about company KPI or efficiency, I care about my own well-being first and foremost […]

So you have a situation where:

- Most of your employees think of your company's success and their lifestyle as competing interests.

- Most of your employees are focused on optimizing their lifestyle rather than the quality of their work.

Essentially these are people who don't actually want to work and would be just as happy or happier on UBI.

Now if you have another company whose employees believe in the company's mission, prioritize company success, don't see a necessary trade-off between work and lifestyle, and enjoy working with their teams in person, the latter company will outcompete the former.

I recall one of my German managers said: "The difference between workers today and the previous generation is that we lived to work, while they work to live."

Show me one example of this.