I'm inclined to both agree and disagree with this. I have no doubt that some people do work more efficiently at home, but it's dependent on a lot of factors, like the specific person, the type of work being doing, how well communication works between colleagues, etc.
I did QA during the pandemic and when everything was going smoothly, I did get the feeling that I was a bit more efficient. Up until something bottlenecked me. I get a pull request and notice something small, and instead of being able to just walk to the dev's desk to ask them about it and clear it up in 2 minutes, I was entirely dependent on the devs actually checking their messages or Emails, which many people neglect during WFH. I often ran into such problems that delayed my work, sometimes for hours at a time. And that kind of thing did not improve significantly after 2 years of WFH.
Oof, you just described the exact type of issue that regularly affects my office. It's always trivial things that pile up. Something that affects me, and that I recently had to put my foot down on, is "Oh, you're going in? Can you do me a favor and..." And I had to find polite ways to say
No. I'm going into the office because I have work to do. If you have work to do that requires coming in, you should probably come in.
And before anybody gets too upset, I do want to reiterate the very first sentence of my post in here on that class divide:
Yes, and it's already starting for some industries (not ALL, some).
I think it is understood that WFH has been a boon to people on a variety of fronts. Costs of travel. Costs of childcare. Mental health. But I think more often than not in these threads (and we've had a few of them now) it gets lost that not everyone has access to the benefits of WFH. Nor is WFH without its cost to
some people. A lot of offices didn't smoothly implement WFH as a response to COVID, and you better believe more often than not, that's burdening
someone.
For example, in my office, I'm part of a recently established task force to make sure that the people who HAVE to come into the office aren't taken advantage of. And one of the proposals is a financial incentive to people who work a certain amount of time in the office. But guess who's fighting that.