I have been permanently remote for nearly a decade now. I never intend to go back into the office, and this is despite regularly traveling to meet with coworkers/customers and realizing that there is a high degree of value to face-to-face communication and camaraderie building.

For me it comes down to three simple things:

1. Commute

2. Control of my Surroundings

3. Time Management (and as a centerpoint, Food)

To expand on these three points, my biggest challenge is that if I were to take on going back to the office in my current or a future role, I'd be putting myself into a situation where I would be expected to be physically present at exactly the same time every day in an environment which I have no control over and which is not structured to suit my style of working or being, and to do so I would need to restructure how I manage my time and especially how I eat (I follow a strict diet and process) in order to adapt to the expectations and allowances of management and coworkers.

If CEOs want workers back in the office, here's a handful of things they can do that would make this much much more tenable, all of which also generally improve society and reduce operational costs for the company:

1. Move your offices away from city centers and towards the places people actually live, and advocate for those municipalities to provide (good, reasonable, high speed) transit interconnection. Teams should be colocated with one another, but to make this possible you need to entice people to the office by making it not a horrible, stressy process to get there and an enjoyable experience once you are there. A maximum 30 minute commute by transit or car, maximum 1 hour by e-bicycle for the average person assigned to that office. Any more than this, and nobody will deal with that. Let me put this into simple business-speak, your best employee's BATNA to RTO is simply quitting and going to work for your competitors remotely, don't be stupid.

2. Provide knowledge workers with assigned offices that have closable doors. If you want to make it by seniority, that's probably reasonable, but it's absolutely insane to expect a staff engineer or senior level PM that are doing strategy, architecture, and planning work that have outsized business impact (and the salaries to match) to share a hotel desk with 3 other people in an open floorplan office where they are /constantly/ interrupted by noise, movement, and other distractions.

3. Constrain meeting schedules to a 5-6 hour block of time centered on the work-day, make it a company rule to avoid meetings on Fridays and to outright ban meetings that are first-thing in the morning or at the very end of the day. Preferably eliminate as many meetings as possible for ICs, but if you're going to make people attend a meeting, it shouldn't fuck up their morning routine by effectively disallowing the flexibility of 10-15 minutes in their morning or at the end of their day. I know for me, I would quit with no notice before I skip my breakfast ahead of work, there's absolutely no excuse for management to demand someone be physically present first thing in the morning down to the minute for office work.

While working remotely none of these things are a concern, I commute 1 minute from my bedroom to my home office, which is in a separate room specifically structured for my preferred working environment, and I can eat while I'm working which means I've never had to skip any of the meal times in my diet in order to meet some arbitrary and unnecessary time expectation. When I do travel to the office, I get less "work" that doesn't involve meeting people face to face done, although I'm usually the first or second person to arrive at the office so have at least some quiet time (and despite my comments above, I am basically never late, I just don't like the anxiety that comes with the expectations), this difference in productivity is pretty much entirely down to surroundings. Open Floor Plan offices are a mistake, and companies don't seem to care and just double-down on it.