Hah. This is pure idiocy.
My Father told me a long time ago, when he was speaking of freedom, an old Russian saying.
It goes something like this:
If you have a lidded garbage can will of rats, and you open the lid even a little, you'll never get the lid back on. I suppose the same can be said for horses and barns to a degree.
Remote work is here to stay. I'd want this for my employees even if I owned the company. It's a matter of management intelligence. These people are stupid.
I hope they all die horribly.
I know why (((they))) want it, it's control and the small minded "If I can't see your butt in a seat, you aren't working." Doesn't matter if 9 of your 8 hours are spent in zoom meetings.
If I had some sort of information business, I'd probably have a small office where people could come if they needed to get away from their house for a minute, or if they were meeting a client. Other than that, tell me if you need something and I'll see you at the Christmas dinner.
If needed, I would just get some sort of "we-work" kind of setup that employees could use if they wanted to have a non-home workspace. Why bother even with the infra for a static office unless you have really specific reasons to?
Though, I would be designing everything to be able to be done anywhere in the world as long as you had a good VPN so there is that.
I guess it really depends on what you want. I appreciate a stable place to go, something that's going to be the same when I go there. But if a rent-a-office works, then that's fine too.