Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
Mrs W's department sold off a lot of space before the pandemic and had booking/hotdesking. But since lockdown reopening there is an edict from on high to work an average of 60% in the office. It's not being followed so the consequence is that it's easy to find a desk and sit with your team (if they're in).I know someone who recently started working in the civil service and it seems they don't really want people to come in - they have reduced the amount of office space available and made it hotdesking for everyone but the more senior people. There's not physically space for everyone to come in at the same time, you have to book a desk in advance and as a result it's not possible to sit with the team that you are actually working with.
That's the Whitehall office - it seems that their offices in other places outside of London are a bit more relaxed and have better attendance.
One factor seems to be that quite a lot of the more senior people nominally working in the London office have actually moved out of London in the past few years and it's now quite time consuming and expensive for them to come in.
The other thing that's happened is a push to get more people to work in offices outside of London (a good thing imo). There's effectively a recruitment freeze in London. So teams are effectively split across 2-3 sites which means all meetings are online - which dissaudes people from coming into the office in person.