Talking to some of my team and coworkers the main thing I hear is they miss face to face interaction with the people they work with, and I do as well. I would like to see the 1 day a week "meeting day" but really try to focus on socializing than "this is the day we do all our meetings" since those seem to be working just as well with video conference. Maybe restrict it to things like 1:1s and group discussions.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)
I've done this in the past - I live in Portland, and worked with a firm in Mount Vernon, WA, which is about three and a half hours north, one way. I didn't go in every week, more like a few days a month staying in a hotel, but I found it very agreeable. I quite enjoyed having a few days to collaborate intensively and then private time to finish the detail work.
That said, I'm notably introverted and happy as a clam during quarantine, more or less, so I'm probably not representative of the country as a whole. Of people currently working remote, I think we'll see about 20% of people who won't want to go back into offices. For my own selfish purposes I'm really hoping for a paradigm shift towards more remote work, but I accept it doesn't work well for some people.
Are you kidding? Traveling economically by air is one of the worst travel experiences you can have. If you're going to do it weekly, then it needs to be relatively cheap to make it worthwhile. Don't forget, too, that if this does become the norm, companies will start decreasing comp to make up for not having to pay people to live in high CoL areas. In terms of comfort, I'd rather stand on a BART train than fly for an hour.
I don't think flying weekly to an office scales up as well as you think it might.
I've known a person or two who flew twice weekly to commute. Honestly I rather an hour flight twice a week than commute an hour each way 5 days a week on BART.
Having a 1 day a week office would I think help people move away from high cost areas. If I only had to do it once a week a multi-hour or even flying to the office once a week wouldn't be bad (assuming that we return to our previous status quo with air travel.)