Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it just "feels like" it will make your company better.
I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never ever work from home is also silly.
Most managers were people doing stuff who got promoted into 'managing' stuff with no obvious output or direct value. It's not really surprising that a chain of these people would knee-jerk react weirdly in a situation they felt exposed as not being that useful / have their limited people a management skills tested in a situation they themselves likely didn't experience.
To reframe your argument more charitably, it seems like most people agree that managing a remote team well is probably a lot harder than in person, and we already know that many managers have not even received the training to do well with an in person team. So we should not be surprised if they are not taking this well.
our lab just got dinged by an employee who was trying to hold got another full time job on the down low....something that would have been caught if the work was in person.
Sure, that happens. But if you think that's actually a significant problem (significant enough to abandon all the benefits of allowing workers to work from home), you're gonna need more than an n=1 anecdote to support that take.
And regardless, that sort of thing happens even when employees work in an office. People can certainly get a part time side gig and do that work from their main job's office. Maybe a little more likely to get caught, but it's far from impossible.
Your problem isn’t that this employee got another job, it’s if their performance and work suffers for it. if they somehow are able to do both then your company is lucky they have an incredible employee and should be liking for means to retain them
You are technically correct, but I would posit “secretly holding two full time, demanding, salaried jobs” is an extremely strong predictor for failing to perform sufficiently at either. Given that, it’s a simple matter of weighing those odds against the costs involved in proving it.
One common argument is if you can’t tell their performance is impacted, they must actually be performing adequately. Except, in a different context, we will happily explain how our own performance can’t be measured by number of lines changed or bugs fixed.
I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never ever work from home is also silly.