I have been working in Human Resources for nearly 25 years. 

Early in my career, I worked in logistics.  Back then, smoking was much more prevalent than it is today.  I remember a protracted debate with our trade union, who were pushing for formal smoking breaks for employees.  They wanted two ten minute breaks per eight hour shift.  The management were concerned.  Surely some employees would abuse this provision if agreed?  They would elongate these breaks and productivity would decline.  Some would inevitably swing more than two breaks a day.  Management time would be required to manage this process, and policies would be needed too. 

Then there were the early days of the internet.  In the early 2000s I worked for a company that required every member of staff to submit a list of the websites that they legitimately used for business to IT, and everything else was blocked.  Because, surely if every employee had unlimited internet access, they would spend all day on Facebook?  The same argument was made about early mobile phones and then smart phones.  Could we block people from accessing their email on the company iPhone?  My comment that employees have their own and would just go and sit on toilet and look at it there instead, was not well received. 

As late as 2013 I worked for an organisation that blocked sites like Amazon so that employees could not while away the hours doing their shopping when they should have been working. 

In coaching, we often say that the presenting issue is not the real issue.  It’s the same with WFH v RTO.  It’s not WFH that is the issue.  Its trust.  Trust, combined with an inability to truly understand productivity. 

There is no real difference between the managers of the late 90s, fretting about smoke breaks and this new fangled thing called social media, and the headlines today about remote work skivers.  It is the same discourse that led FW Taylor to monitor every task under his scientific management approach.  

Any time soon, I fully expect this narrative to shift to AI.  Who are all these lazy employees, using technology to do their work for them instead of toiling to do it themselves? 

It is Theory X, all the way down.