It’s because meetings and full calendars of check ins and touch bases is constant and actually is the productive work for an executive. They are the ones wanting productivity for themselves. The byproduct of this executive productivity is it causes the busy work for the people who are lower in the org chart. Busywork for them is a big source of their nonproductive time and what was freed up during mandatory WFH generating the productivity boost.

Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do.

This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.