What a change
one of my biggest challenges when I worked for Google (2015-16, ~55,000 employees) was setting up a meeting. Getting a spot on everyone's calendar was Hard. Getting a meeting room? impossible. The switch to online meetings alone would have notably boosted productivity, once people adjusted.
Google's culture is *special*. It's really difficult to communicate if you've not experienced it. They built some sort of Neverland Ranch that is designed to keep work on your mind constantly. It's really targeted to make green grads think that they are in the best place *ever*. For folks that are married with kids? Not so much.
Google measures everything. They have a sizable team (People Analytics) dedicated to statistics regarding their workforce. They A/B hiring strategies. They run deep regressions on their population. If it were any other company, I would simply assume that this push is the usual middle-manglement opposition. While I don't doubt that this is a significant factor, I think that there is also a good chance they they're actually seeing a retention issue for their senior-level employees compared to prepandemic, and that they have some sort of data that wfh is part of it.
The problem, of course, is that this policy is likely to create a much more serious retention issue with those over thirty.