not speaking for IT, but for everyone else there are repercussions for companies that do not have employees in the office. For one, there is less mentoring going on, so younger or newer people are not learning at the rate they should be or are making mistakes that if they were in direct contact with a mentor would have been avoid. The others are company culture and positive benefits of collaboration, people feeding off of each other. The happy medium is probably let employees work from home one or two days a week and be in the office at other times.
It is essential for cities like Des Moines to have a strong and healthy core. The companies want access to young talent. Yes young people like the idea of working from home, but they also want to live in cities with an active arts and music scene. It takes a strong core to make that happen. If things fall apart in the core, it makes it way harder for companies to recruit talent, they will just lose out to Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver etc.. Des Moines went through this decades ago, the civic leaders and business leaders recognized they had a problem in that there was a brain drain, they were losing talent to other places. So they hired a consultant who told them to reverse this trend, they had better create an environment and invest in a healthy arts and music scene. They did it and it worked.
