By doing this you are most likely to atrophy from your most senior and experienced staff who can readily find another remote job, this leads to brain drain in the organization and sets you up worse long term for perceived short term benefits which are dubious at best. I think management has doubted the degree to which people would make remote work their hill to die on in terms of job benefits.
Losing some key staff might be better than a 2nd, 3rd, Nth round of layoffs which could cause an increasing crisis in confidence, which would lead to proportionally more senior staff leaving.
Honestly layoffs seem like a really fraught way to save money. They always trim at a nice even number like 10%, so you know they didn't run any analysis to suggest what an appropriate amount would be , and just did what number seemed right in the guts of boardmembers, probably just being a lemming doing a similar cut as a competitor to not spook shareholders too much. How much could payroll be, 30% of revenue? You cut 10% of payroll you are only saving 3% of revenue and stoking a lot of fear among your troops in the process. How much is an office lease obligation on the other hand versus the savings from these layoffs weighed against the potential revenue that labor could have generated had you kept them employed?
Why would you assume payroll is 30% of revenue? For companies dealing with limited runway there is a good chance payroll is >100% revenue, and in general for software companies payroll is the single highest expense.
