1. Real estate interests are extremely wealthy and powerful in nearly all nations, and in every OECD nation. Commercial real estate especially so. Take a look at the wealthiest individuals in a nation, and a big chunk of them are connected to real estate. It is realistic instead of cynical to expect these interests to hammer for a return to status quo ante, regardless of the actual benefits to those who must follow such diktats.

2. In the US at least in my experience and from observing my clients' organizations, after two decades of relentless offshoring, for high-wage roles we're nearly scraping the bottom third percentile of the talent barrel globally for available replacements for on-shore talent, without accreting significant technical, organizational, support, maintenance, goodwill, and other types of intangible debt that CxO's increasingly recognize as burdensome friction to rapid innovation. Gains to be had offshoring are measured in inches and not yards now, with lots of attention-to-detail work to achieve it; the gains exist, but are just as hard to accomplish anywhere in the world, domestic or offshore. Just recently here on HN we were discussing management/promotion engineering/demotion, with a significant sidebar conversation on hybrid tech lead roles; there aren't that many people wired for that kind of balanced hybrid, and throw that on top of the complexities we normally deal with, and it is no wonder it is hard to recruit no matter where you look in the world.

3. Lots of "I need that separation" reports are very familiar to those who have been doing remote work for a decade or more. It takes anywhere from a year to multiple years to work out accommodations and find your groove when remote working. Finding that separation is part of it. Some people never adjust to it, and that's okay.

4. We have plausibly reached beyond the observer effect-type improvements in productivity [1] from the remote work change in habits, so this mass social experiment shows there is something substantive to remote work compared to traditional office work.

5. We have not yet reached critical mass on the time everyone has been working from home to internalize the effects of their new normal. Remote workers who have successfully made the switch have reported this takes between 6-18 months typically. This takes different forms in people. For some an intense loneliness sets in, others depression, others are happier, others find more energy. This is the Remote Work Great Filter.

6. We flipped the switch and paused a system that has taken literally centuries of refinement upon office work, and started a remote equivalent under emergency conditions from scratch in many instances with (from initial indications) no productivity hit, and some even claiming a small productivity increase. What kinds of productivity increases lie behind further remote work refinement?

7. A "grey system" of hybridized remote and on-prem office presence can unlock interesting benefits. As expensive as offices are, the pandemic response shows that they aren't so unbearably expensive that companies would wholesale leap at the slightest opportunity to unload them. This might change with the depression barreling down upon us, but for now, there is the opportunity (and perhaps even requirement) to use long-term commercial lease agreements (or even more long-term capex real estate purchases) to double or triple the amount of space in company offices. A soft turn away from the open office plan.

8. As flawed as the response was in the US, a lesson I drew from it is the qualitative change in information infrastructure since only a couple decades ago enabled private entities everywhere (not just the US) to rapidly route around many kinds of damage in many, adaptive, different ways. Very rapid, Net-based, decentralized, decoupled decision-making like depicted in some futurist visions is already here in a proto-form.

A lot of the response depends upon organizational culture and individual psychosocial makeup. I agree with the author, a hybrid grey response seems the most realistic. Remote work has the potential out of this experience to go from a marginal recruiting tool to an integral part of capex and opex plans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect