Yeah, pre-COVID I had to walk over to a client that was a small software company to discuss with HR some complicated matters related to an employee’s green card process. HR literally had nowhere where we could meet behind a closed door. How can one possibly function in HR with no way to have a private conversation?
That’s a weird set up. My company recently announced hoteling and how the system worked to reserved desks in the office. Which I thought odd because I haven’t seen any indication that we needed such a system. This leads me to suspect they’re going to demand a lot of us return to the office at least a few days a week. I’m in HR and will have my own dedicated space because so I can maintain confidentiality. Seriously, their HR didn’t have a place to discuss anything in confidence?
Nope, our option was to block off the women’s bathroom, or go to the back corner behind the ping-pong table and whisper. We did a combination of the latter and speaking in semi-encoded language…
My work (child welfare social work) is only partially conducive to a WFH model. We do allow employees to WFH a few days per month with extensive documentation of what tasks they are completing.
I tried working from home a few times during COVID but it was extremely difficult due to various factors. We even had Zoom court hearings for awhile.
Social work for the most part requires frequent, ongoing communication with multiple agencies and people as well as field work that cannot be done solely from home. Some of it can and I think our agency has worked out a reasonable system for now.
Yes, even as a huge fan of WFH, i recognize the importance of personal relationships among employees, and a sense of belonging.
As an experienced individual contributor, i had lots of social capital at the start of the pandemic. And i took pains to maintain it, setting up “virtual coffee breaks” with my team and other coworkers. And even so, i suffered some decay in my office network. (Although i managed to strengthen some bonds within my team, which i take as a major win. The team coffee breaks were my idea, and i sent out the meeting makers, but i discussed it with my boss and got his buyin, up front.)
But i think that new employees benefit from being in-person. And i think those who manage new employees owe it to those people to show up in person regularly enough to be present for them. And of course, lots of jobs just work better in person. For instance, if you regularly meet with more than 3-4 people at a time, it’s probably good to be in the same room for a lot of those meetings.
My job really didn’t benefit from being in the office, though.
I was a “work from home” person from way back when. I did consultation work while looking for a job as far back as 1998 and then in 2006 I accepted a Minneapolis-based job and worked from my home office in Manhattan, doing FileMaker development and support to the end users of the database. Two years later when they laid me off, I worked as a consultant from that same home office and did not have an employer, just clients.
Since then, there have only been a couple stretches when I commuted to work regularly. That includes my current position in its original incarnation but when COVID hit they, like everyone else, opted for work-from-home for any position where that was feasible, and it was for me so I continue to do so.
It’s definitely a case of “it’s a good fit for the kind of work that I do” and also that it’s a good fit for me and my personality and work habits. My home office has always been a separate space from the “home life” part of my environment, and I’m the kind of person who likes a fully emptied task-inbox when I quit for the day, so if there’s any goofing off or use of clocked time for non-work-related activities, it’s because I stay caught up and can do it legitimately.
Might not be that weird depending on the field/company - I remember reading that the office set up in The Intern (where even the CEO did not have a private office ) was based on real offices located in old buildings/factories. And some small companies don’t even have any trained , official HR people - my husband works for a family owned company. The third generation has been running it for over 20 years. They contracted with a HR consulting company until maybe 58 years ago - until then, the CFO handled HR because isn’t payroll part of HR?
This is a big concern. I do orientation for new articling students. In 2020, they arrived after we’d shut down for two months. It was the first real Teams presentation I had to do, them all socially distanced around a big board room, me zooming in from my kitchen. No real chitchat, no going out for coffee afterwards.
And then, during their articles year, we would send them work assignments by e-mail, and they would reply by e-mail. Some telephone calls and zooms. We did our best, but I think they really suffered.
Articling year is an apprenticeship year with senior lawyers. The students are to follow you around, go to court, go to meetings. They should be able to just drop into one of the senior lawyer’s offices if they have a question, small or big, about their articles. I should be able to just poke my head in to their office and ask how things are going, or invite them to a meeting that’s just come up.
They didn’t get any of that.
One measure is that normally, I remember the names of articling students and their year of articles pretty well, at least for a couple of years afterwards. I have trouble remembering the students from that year.
And part of succeeding in law is networking. If the lawyers from your articling year have trouble remembering who you were …
When full time WFH became a thing where I worked, I would use the free Google Duo program (now called Google Meet) to view and chitchat with the couple of colleagues I was close to. Like Zoom, you can also do audio only calls.
I don’t like working from home. I’d much rather get up, get dressed, do my makeup and hair and go some place. I feel like working from home would eventually put me in a rut of not caring about my appearance and not focusing on my work because there are other distractions at home. My job is easy and my hours are pretty flexible. I leave when my work is done and have Fridays off. Leaving my house, dogs and retired husband behind for 5- 6 hours, four days a week is fine with me. 
Being out of the house ~24 hours per week is a pretty good gig. My pre-retirement workload was similar although WFH wasn’t an option. I was sad when I retired and lost that excuse to be elsewhere doing otherwise.
It’s the folks who put in 50 hours per week at work, plus10-20 hours per week commuting to/from work who really love WFH.
For them, the incremental value of each extra hour at home is tremendous. For you, or former me, not as much.
Personally, I miss going to the office.
Sure, it was a hassle and there are many benefits to working from home but I read more when I commuted. I socialized more when I was at work (and by that I mean after work drinks/snacks/shows). I was more plugged in to my city since I’d see this and that while commuting.
I work from home now and like it but I do miss the “old” days. I think something of value to society has been lost.
ETA: Kinda miss having to dress well for work too. Again, more of a hassle, a little less comfortable but you felt a bit better about yourself when dressed well (or, at least, I did).
Biggest benefit of WFH (in addition to more sleep): getting to listen to music on speaker all day at work.
I’m sitting in our office right now. There is one other person sitting in the block of around 40 open-plan workspaces around me. Maybe 2 or 3 in the next block over.
At the moment I’m listening to a global “all hands” call from our CEO telling us about how bad last year sucked and how our culture is so much better than all the other consulting firms I’ve worked at where I’ve heard the same all-hands speech over the years.
Other than some free snacks and coffee, I’m not really feeling any actual benefit for me to be sitting here.
You mean they don’t have a Teams mod to allow for piloting jets from the comfort of your poolside?? Man, tech is really lagging behind employee needs.
It’s coming. Seriously.
The latest cockamamie idea is one live pilot in the airliner and one poor bastard on the ground in a simplified desktop sorta-simulator who’s acting as the on-call co-pilot assistant for anywhere from 10 to 20 actual flights in progress.
That person probably won’t be WFH even 10 years after this system is mainstream. Though the office they’d work from could be cheaply installed in almost any office building in almost any city, and travel won’t be part of the job. No reason they couldn’t be offshored. E.g. Chinese labor at e.g. Chinese labor prices.
The next step in the planned evolution is zero pilots in the airplane or on the ground. By 2100 there will be as many active airline pilots as there are active elevator operators. Or at least such are the fever dreams of Airbus, Boeing, and the airlines.
As Patton said (at least in the movie):
Pretty clearly the upside (such little as there may be) to being in the office is completely lost unless nearly everybody else is there too. And is there routinely.
WFH or not is one of those phase changes, like melting ice or crystals aggregating out of a super-saturated solution. Organizationally, nearly all WFH or nearly zero WFH are stable. Trying to maintain a moderate mix of each is unstable and will quickly flee to one of the two extremes.
So this guy is going to press “takeoff”, then “autopilot”, then “land” for up to 20 aircraft, all by himself?!
As far as society as a whole, it’s probably better to work in the office. That creates value through commercial real estate and the associated economic impacts of having lots of people in one place, such as shopping and dining. As individuals we may prefer the comfort and convenience of WFH, but it will likely have a significant impact on the economic prosperity of our communities.
For instance, without a lot of office workers, many restaurants can’t afford to offer a lunch service and wouldn’t be able to survive with just a dinner service. And even with just dinner service, the number of diners would be less since the workers are working from home and aren’t going to drive downtown to go to the restaurant. Fewer restaurants (and other businesses) will be economically viable if most people WFH. The city will get less revenue and the citizens will have fewer places to shop, dine and do other activities.