The Absurdity of the Return-to-Office Movement::The return-to-office demands make little sense from an overall economic perspective, while working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time commuting to an office, writes Peter Bergen.
I sympatize with folk that want to stay home, but I personally am functioning much better in an office environment with those talked-about chance encounters. I am interested to see where we will be in 10-20 years when it comes to working from home.
Return to office has nothing to do with the people who do better in an office environment. It’s about forcing those who don’t do as well in an office, and those who the commute or time away from the house isn’t feasible, back into the office.
Sometimes that “chance encounter” is really just one mouthy coworker cornering another coworker who doesn’t like saying no even though they have work they need to attend to. For those people, just avoiding chatty coworkers is a challenge and they get less done because people won’t leave them alone with tangential bullshit.
Some of your coworkers have sensory issues that are constantly irritated and distracted by being in a loud, bright, and chaotic office.
This isn’t about you. You were always allowed to be in the office (save for pandemic lockdowns). So don’t make it about you.
I’m not going to down vote you - some people do like the social experience at work. I just respectfully disagree. I’m at work to make money and to keep my skills sharp - I don’t (and have never really) enjoy hanging out with coworkers outside of the normal work related areas.
As a mostly introverted person, work from home has been a godsend. I can focus on communicating with my manager and coworkers in ways that are more comfortable for me - and thus result in a more positive experience for everyone.
Plus the amount of work I get done at home is easily double what I was doing when working from the office 5 days a week.
This is me. No distractions = more work getting done, more time to think on emails and project plans, etc. In the office, I go home exhausted by the 15th person that interrupted my train of thought that day.
You mean those times the boss scolds you about because you’re just chatting in the hallway instead of working at your desk as it should be. Oh, you’re having a quick in person discussion with a colleague with the white board? Did you book that room a week in advance? No? Well, do that meeting somewhere next to people trying to focus. And why are you all standing around the desk for? Showing each other’s work? It’s gossiping more likely. Back to your own desk!
That was my experience for the last decades until work from home really happened. I had the impression many bosses liked to stop chance encounters so you just did your best keeping quiet and pretending to be busy. Encounters happened despite the environment, not because of it.
And then suddenly in the last year talks in the hallway were the most important stuff ever. Sure.
Losing 3 hours of your life per day stuck in traffic, polluting the planet, spending money you dont have in gas and downtown lunches so your colleague can tell you all about the weather and you can assist to the same meetings on video calls with people that are in another country… yay…
ok? and they aren’t, that’s the point. it’s absolutely bewildering seeing so many people now defend the hellish grind that previously was at most grudgingly accepted as most of adult life - working 5 days in a row, out of the house all day, commuting, up early, no matter the weather or your mood or health. insane.
You don’t deserve to be downvoted for your reasoned opinion. I do really disagree with you, though, and think that people will look on the pre-pandemic times with a similar eye to the 1500s. Just backwards.
There are certainly jobs that will always be in person–healthcare could be a good example. Most probably don’t need them for any reason at all. The real question is deciding which is which.
For me, while I have worked from home in past jobs, I enjoy going to office as it puts me into a different mind set all together. I have found that I need a separation of environments, otherwise I would spend my off time at home working into the late hours. Also, I would easily spend the entire time sat down in a chair instead of walking around every now and then in an office setting. But that’s me and how I function. I know not everyone is like that.
Having a dedicated “office” space in your home helps a lot with that environment separation. If you have kids, that space needs to have a door that can close, too.
Don’t work in your pajamas on the couch, that’s the worst thing ever for your mental health.
Yes, I can attest that WFH was a hell of a lot easier when I didn’t have kids. It was 100 times harder with them around. Unfortunately while I carved out a space in my house for WFH, it didn’t prevent my kids from interfering with work tasks lol. It may be a little different now that they are both in school for the day.
That’s an education issue. The kids need to learn that mom/dad is working and to avoid disturbing them. I’ve WFH for almost 10 years now, and I’ve had homeschooled kids at home the whole time. Yes, they had to learn to leave me alone at first, but it only took a few months.
I had a separate wardrobe for work, had a separate phone that I turned off when I went to bed, separate laptop, all that.
It really helped me keep a sense of separation.
But most of the time my commute was on a bus so I could work the whole way in and out. Commuting by car would have suuuuuucked.
The wardrobe is a good point! I would also add that if your behind computers all day that you spend the extra to make your home office environment comfortable as much as possible. You really do take climate control for granted in the office setting 😉
Yup, I’m one of about 6 people who work in my office that used to have around 100 in 2020. They all still work here, just from home. Great for me, especially with the reduced headcount. But many of my coworkers also like WFH, and I’d be first in line to threaten to leave if there was a return to office mandate.
I’m a “dont shit where you eat” type and just cant do any productive work in my home. Doesn’t mean i would force people to work in an office with me, but lots of people do benefit from a office environment.
What chance encounters have you experienced? Generally interested, since I’m stuck enforcing a RTO plan while being full time remote.
Just meeting people in the hallway for a quick chat where we stand on different projects, what other teams are planning and so on, as well as personal stuff. Just your average office chats.
I have all of those too, just online lol. When in the office people shouldn’t be stopped in the hallway anyway, if they’re in the hallway it’s because they have some place to be. By stopping them you’re disrupting their work.
I’ve seen others make this argument in other threads. It really does tell me that people view this in a very different way. It does seem to me that you find the chance encounters and social aspect of the job to be beneficial. A lot of people, myself included, find those to be exhausting, in the way, and detrimental to mental health. At home, all that overhead disappears and I can just do my work.
Not sure why you’re getting down voted to hell. I don’t understand why people refuse to believe there is anything beneficial to human collaboration about being in person. It was a lot easier to help out teammates for a 10 or 15 minutes chat near a communal white board or on pen and paper as opposed to scheduling a virtual video call, and creating a diagram in power point or lucid chart in advance for something I could sketch by hand in 60 seconds in real time. Also those discussions did lead to SMEs overhearing and dropping in to provide additional help were great. Unfortunately this hybrid choose your own home or office location is just the worst of both worlds for those that come in.
A lot of people don’t like to drive 2 or 3 hours in a day for that 15 minutes around the whiteboard when you can instead do an hour inefficiently in an online meeting and still get ahead in terms of times spent on work.
It adds up when you have a lot of meetings where you need to do that. Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane. And I’m not suggesting office work needs to be 5 days a week. Also the type of work really makes a difference as well. I’m also not sure wfh is more efficient. In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.
That never stopped people having meetings. Before virtual you had good ol’ teleconference and you were on the phone the entire day. You also had clients wanting a meeting or the company office in a different city/state/country/continent that wanted to discuss things so you travelled multiple hours for a one hour meeting in some cases. Fun times.
Time management and the ability to say no remain important, in office or work from home.
A 2 to 3 hour commute (1 1/2 hours both ways) is unfortunately given the traffic situation and general suburban sprawl structure of the US not insane at all here. It is considered a long commute, but not super far out of the ordinary.
Of course there is something beneficial to being with other humans.
Is it beneficial even on the days when you’re just getting your head down?
Flexibllity is the key. Let the teams decide how they work best. Mandates, one way or the other, are silly.
I think that’s where it breaks down and the people in the office get the worst of both worlds. It’s actually less constructive to be in an office where you are taking calls all day with multiple remote employees that could be in the office. I don’t go into the office at all anymore, but I would be happy and happier to be back in the office 3 days a week if I knew the teams I worked with were also in the office. Pre pandemic I had a very flexible in office policy where the norm was to be in the office 3 or 4 days a week. But folks that had long commutes were able to leave the office early and work from their commuter trains to wrap up the day. Folks on the team would roll in anytime between 830 and 11am. I think the unfortunate thing about RTO policy is that coming down from HR in a 1 size fits all approach makes it less flexible and terrible with badge swipe counting and what not. And in order to be fair, some type of written policy must be in place, but teams, managers, etc. should have flexibility to make it work for their teams.
I agree completely that being in the office while 50% of the team is not is borderline useless. When I’m arguing for teams finding their own approach, I definitely also argue that teams should agree on days when they’re all in the office together (our team’s office day is Thursday - we organise 1:1s, brainstorming sessions and social gatherings on Thursday when we know we will be together in person).
As an non-office worker remote work is quite foreign to me to begin with but I imagine that if I had to do such work I wouldn’t get any of it done at home. For the very least I’d need a proper home office that’s only for work but I bet that even then I would just fuck around doing other stuff rather than put in the hours I would if I actually had to go to work.