The article assumes that making money is the primary goal of a corporation. If it was, then sure, WFH would make sense.
However, the corporation is not a sentient entity. It cannot desire anything, be it money or something else. It's only human participants that have incentives.
Of those, only shareholders have direct incentive to make profit, but even then they may own the shares for speculative purposes and desire share price to grow, not necessarily the profit. And even that's not necessarily true: Those who short their position may actually want the shore price to drop.
But shareholders in fact don't have much influence of business decisions of the corporation. Those are delegated to the management. The management, in turn, has incentives to extract as much rent from the business as possible. Thus, it cares about profits only to the extent where it adds to their rent. Increasing profit while decreasing the rent is a bad trade-off.
Regular employees, in their turn have incentives very similar to the management. They want to be paid as much as possible without losing the job.
All in all, you can think of it as of struggle for a limited resource (bananas, share of profit) in a group of chimpanzees.
Now, imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work.
In the end, I would say that WFH would only work if everybody worked from home, completely changing the way the group interacts.
What if one chimpanzee sometimes stepped away from the group and all their bickering, noise, ego-driven shenanigans, and other distractions? Maybe that chimpanzee would pick more bananas (and share them with the group).
Office culture is often (I'd say usually) toxic and/or inefficient. Being in the office doesn't mean any useful work is getting done. And just because people are in the same general vicinity doesn't mean they're interacting in a useful/beneficial way or even interacting at all.
Working from home is certainly different from working in the office, but being in the office isn't some natural state of affairs or a particularly useful baseline.
> imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work.
I feel like this part of your comment could easily be overlooked, but it's a pretty astute observation of how group dynamics applies to this situation. We're wired to be tribal animals, to some extent.
Everyone knows that "culture" is an important part of a company's success. The idea of working from home profoundly affects the culture.
However, the corporation is not a sentient entity. It cannot desire anything, be it money or something else. It's only human participants that have incentives.
Of those, only shareholders have direct incentive to make profit, but even then they may own the shares for speculative purposes and desire share price to grow, not necessarily the profit. And even that's not necessarily true: Those who short their position may actually want the shore price to drop.
But shareholders in fact don't have much influence of business decisions of the corporation. Those are delegated to the management. The management, in turn, has incentives to extract as much rent from the business as possible. Thus, it cares about profits only to the extent where it adds to their rent. Increasing profit while decreasing the rent is a bad trade-off.
Regular employees, in their turn have incentives very similar to the management. They want to be paid as much as possible without losing the job.
All in all, you can think of it as of struggle for a limited resource (bananas, share of profit) in a group of chimpanzees.
Now, imagine what would happen if one chimpanzee refused to participate in the group's interactions, walked away, but still demanded his share of bananas. It's not going to work.
In the end, I would say that WFH would only work if everybody worked from home, completely changing the way the group interacts.