• I have been a full-time remote worker for nearly all of my career.

• Return-to-office mandates are not really about a productivity or better meetings.

• They are about ensuring the company becomes the center of your life.

I am a fully remote employee and have been for almost my whole career. So I can say from experience that today's corporate return-to-office mandates are ridiculous, unnecessary and, in some instances, even cruel.

These mandates are a make-believe golden wand that CEOs are waving while chanting the incantation "productivity."

What's really going on has very little to do with productivity, where the data on the impact of office work versus remote is either mixed or non-existent. Even Amazon, a company that worships at the altar of data-driven decisions, has admitted that its RTO mandate isn't based on data, but is a "judgment" call.

So said CEO Andy Jassy to employees after 30,000 petitioned him not to upend employees' lives if they don't live near assigned offices. Instead, he threatened to dismiss them if they don't relocate to sit at office desks three days a week.

He also said he spoke with 60 to 80 CEOs of other companies about remote work, and "virtually all of them" preferred bringing employees back to the office.

CEOs' desire to see employees chatting in hallways has little to do with producing more work and everything to do with being annoyed by a seeming lack of control.

What's even more ludicrous is that they are trying to do by force what would naturally occur if they simply let their post-pandemic workforce evolve and adopted good management practices to evolve with it.

The other things driving RTO mandates

RTO mandates are really motivated by a mix of other things. For one, CEOs and CFOs are looking at big expenditures on corporate offices that remain either empty or are vastly oversized. So the first reason for mandates is a bit like a parent throwing a tantrum: I'm paying for this nice place and you aren't using it properly!