Reading these arguments are funny to me. By now there should be decades worth of research on this topic, all we seem to do is give anecdote after anecdote with no conclusion.
Either no is doing this research or no one trusts the conclusions.
Other topics like this are WFH or RTO, 4 day WW or 6 day WW. We as a profession seem to never come to a consensus.
It should be unsurprising that we don't really have a science of what company policies work best. There are a lot of variables at play and they likely interact with each other in non-linear ways. Outcomes are hard to measure and may look different at different time horizons. For example, if policy A results in more productivity but makes retaining effective employees more difficult you may need several months or even a few years of observations to truly understand the effects. Companies are quite private about their information and they want control over their own company policy. Experiments are costly to perform. How would you perform one? Randomly select a bunch of companies and try to randomly get them to adopt different sorts of policies?
I think this is why you see a lot of herd behavior amongst companies. Some business leader who feels they just have an intuitive sense of what's best just tries something. Are they right? Who knows? But if the company does OK it is evidence the policy isn't a total disaster so more companies follow suit.
I upvoted your comment earlier and came back just now hoping I’d find it at the top with replies linking the research that must exist. But no; you’ve just been buried under a mountain of anecdata. Ohh well.
What profession does? You realize there are vested interests, competing interests and a varying degree of people optimizing for their individual careers, right?
Either no is doing this research or no one trusts the conclusions.
Other topics like this are WFH or RTO, 4 day WW or 6 day WW. We as a profession seem to never come to a consensus.