There seems to be a fundamental battle shaping up after the pandemic, between employers and employees, in regards to working from home. Before the pandemic, we all basically worked in the office (at least those of us with white-collar office jobs). Now, three-plus years later, we’ve learned, adapted, and adjusted to the hybrid reality of post-pandemic work.
My company began sending people home part-time fairly quickly once the pandemic became a known issue, and we went home full-time before the end of 2020. We worked from home for nearly 2.5 years, with lots of benefits and help with materials and home setup to make working from home a reality and possible in the most convenient, most ergonomic ways. Before the pandemic, we rarely had any kind of video conference calls. I had never even heard of Zoom or Teams. But they quickly became the norm in everyday communications, not just between the members of my team and my department, but our entire company.
Before the pandemic, I got emails (or email replies to the job request tickets I was handling). Or a phone call. Now, even after we are back to the office, we are all still communicating on Teams, as well as using it for file storage, commenting, chatting, and video conferencing. It means that our contact with our regional colleagues around the world is much more immediate than it used to be, and one simply cannot escape. I get pinged constantly with questions and information on Teams, as WELL as the aforementioned emails and ticket replies.
We went back to the office part-time in 2022, and that gradually ramped up. At first it was 3 days home, 2 days onsite. Now, we’ve been told that the rule is 80% in the office. That is, only one day a week may be a work-from-home day, and it cannot be regularly scheduled…that is, you may not work from home on the same day each week. Before the rule was enforced, we had a very flexible schedule, where we could work from home 1 day or 2 days, alternating.
To be honest, I LOVED working from home more than probably most of my colleagues. I liked the quiet, the fact that I could focus (my desk at the office is one of 16 in an open landscape with very little buffering), the fact that I could get up 30 minutes later because I didn’t have to drive, the fact that I didn’t have to drive (!) even before we got our electric car, the fact that I could empty the dishwasher at lunchtime, or get the laundry done, without ever eating into my actual work hours.
We all learned how to be effective working from home, and I felt my work/life balance was better for it. Now, I’m struggling a bit with the “order” that seems to me to be backwards-thinking, inflexible, and unwanted.
Someone is ALWAYS needing to work from home for some reason. People don’t feel 100% well, but they’re not sick enough to stop them from working. People need to be home to get a delivery or let someone in who is doing work on their house. People have doctors appointments at inconvenient times that make it difficult to coordinate logistics. People have sick kids. Before, you maybe couldn’t work at all or part of those days. You took a day off, or hours from your account, or a sick day. The company WINS if you work those days instead, even if just part of them. And many of us found that we actually worked MORE when we were working from home, sometimes, because it was EASY and comfortable, even if it isn’t something to encourage.
For companies that pride themselves on sustainability and forward-thinking employee practices, I believe that working from home or working remotely is the way to go. Why drive to work every day if you don’t need to? If you can get your work done effectively and professionally, why does it matter where you are? I agree that we should be in the office, too! It builds camaraderie, it encourages on-the-spot discussions and lets ideas flow more freely between people, but I think there must be a way to balance both sides.
And I don’t think the working-from-home genie is going to go back into the pre-pandemic bottle. We’ve learned too much. I think companies need to get with the program and be as flexible as possible for those who CAN work from home a few days a week, who DO get their jobs done, and help raise the work/life balance to the best possible level for everyone.
Mood: contemplative
Music: Katie Herzig—Best Day of Your Life
Even before the pandemic, the main reason it was extremely rare to work at home was because bad managers have to be able to see their employees working, or they immediately assume everyone’s home watching TV and cheating the company. Never mind the fact that many people who work at home end up working more hours, either in the evenings or even on weekends. Or the fact that the bad managers couldn’t even bring themselves to trust the people working at home that were obviously getting all their work done.
Now that the world has proven it’s possible to work at home and actually be a responsible, productive employee, you’d think that all the bad managers would change their thinking. But no… they can’t. Because they’re bad managers. All employees must be within eyesight at all times!
UGH! It’s so true!