A lot of workers want to go back to the office, too.
The social, career, and daily experiences of in-person office work have a wide number of tangible benefits that can’t be replicated sitting at home on the computer.
The social, career, and daily experiences of in-person office work have a wide number of tangible benefits that can’t be replicated sitting at home on the computer.
Think about it, spending most of your week all on your own in the same room, with no one and nothing to keep you company except your own thoughts and some bits of text on a glaring LCD screen. Humans weren't meant to live like this.
I agree. It would do those people good to get a life outside of work...
Before working from home full time I lived 10 minutes away from the office. If you do the math you have to compute the difference in rent/mortgage between a house 1+ hours away from work vs. 10 minutes then factor in driving that car, potential risk of auto accident, health issues due to added stress of leaving for work on time and driving with others...
each person to their own. Office, for those who love it, is fine - there's nothing wrong with wanting a social setting for work.
The only problem is when such desire could prevent the WFH folks from getting what they want. Both _should_ be allowed to exist, and the workers choose for themselves without coercion or pressure.
Here are 15 about working from home from my perspective:
- It eliminates the need for spending time commuting, which becomes free time.
- It eliminates most of the need for spending money on a car that sits still most of the time. To the degree that I don't even own a car right now and just Uber/taxi/bus everywhere and rent when I actually need one.
- I get to spend more time with my partner and pets.
- I get to live wherever the hell I want so long as I have decent Internet available.
- I will always be able to use a beefy desktop computer instead of a slow laptop and a lesser set-up.
- I am able to tend to home duties that require people at home (such as receiving packages or maintenance workers).
- I can exert vastly more control over distractions and end up more productive.
- Lunch time is far less of a concern (not restricted to tupperware-compatible foods) and cheaper (since there's more home-cooked options available, I order less food overall).
- I get to have specialty coffee whenever I want, however I want, real proper espresso included.
- If I'm not feeling it after lunch, I can be available on Slack on-demand during the day in order not to block anyone and then do focus-demanding tasks late at night.
- I like listening to somewhat loud music and I don't like wearing headphones all day.
- I don't have to worry about being "office presentable" every day for a long streak of hours. Meaning less effort, more time, and for some people, more money.
- I don't feel as much pressure to attend after-office events when I'm not feeling up to it.
- Even when an office is equipped for powernapping, it can't compare to my own bed in the privacy of my home.
- And speaking of: If you don't have the luxury of living in a neighborhood where opportunist burglars aren't a thing, your presence will dissuade most of them from going into your home.
I am not part of the crew that absolutely rules out going back to an office ever in their lives. But there is a big number attached to it during negotiation that matches the huge life improvement that WFH is for me.
- It's something that makes me leave the house - I've found that being around people has a positive effect on my mental health and general wellbeing - As I live in a small apartment, I don't have the desk space for a multi monitor setup I would prefer - The coffee is just way better than the one I am able to make at home - It's an occasion when I have to look presentable, so I'm taking better care of myself
So going forward, we need to realize people are in different situations, situations can change and if the employers care about their employees the WFH option needs to stay.
Expanding on this:
Not commuting means one is also not contributing to traffic congestion, not emitting CO2, reducing fuel consumption, extending the life of the vehicle, not being at risk of traffic collision.
That last bit seems to be a big one that insurance companies should favor. Reduction of time on the road is a reduction of risk of injury. In my opinion WFH should also be a reason to reduce automotive insurance costs.
Please cite your sources
https://wfhresearch.com/research-and-policy/
Many benefits. But one downside he mentioned was that he doesn’t generate research ideas through planned 30-minute one-on-one interactions but through more unstructured conversations. Those are eliminated with virtual seminars and virtual conferences. Early-career folks might struggle too but I am not sure if that was articulated by his research.
This is obviously just annecdata, but in my working life I can think of literally zero ideas which emerged from just happening to run into someone in the canteen or one of the corridors. Most work conversations are vacuous, time-wasting bullshit. Fun if you've nothing better to do, and nice for greasing the social wheels, but rarely a source of brilliant transformation.
In a depressingly large number of work spaces, creativity and innovation are rarely relevant to your job description anyway. You're not there to transform the business. You're there to churn through whatever piece of nonsense has been handed down from on high, and since in quite a significant number of cases the work you've been given will make zero practical difference to the overall well-being of the company it doesn't really matter if you do it well or badly.
Even if that weren't the case, what is it that is supposed to make serendipitous encounters inherently better than structured idea development? Are we really supposed to believe that just happening to encounter the person who holds the missing puzzle piece of what you're working on are exactly the moment you need it is the best way of generating transformative ideas? I'm not saying that such random encounters don't happen and can't be significant. But one reason these things turn into corporate legends is because they are rare and outlandish. "I said something in a taxi or a bar and someone else said something that turned into $$$" is a story, whereas, "I was stuck so I laid out the problem in a Slack channel or took it to on online brainstorming session and a couple of my co-workers helped me fix it" isn't. But that's because the first case is a weird freaky miracle, and the second is just an ordinary, effective way of running a business.
Some individuals probably feel much more productive because they're able to work without interruption. My guess is that because serendipity is reduced, variation between employees is growing, and useful techniques aren't being shared.
This has been a common argument about returning to office, especially for R&D jobs. But in my experience in corp R&D, people are so busy in meetings/running between conference rooms, there isn't even enough time to get their actual work done, let alone do free-form discussion. ICs end up using the after-work hours to do most of their work.
WFH actually solves that -- people can stay longer for meetings near the end of the day because they are already home, and don't need to beat the traffic.
N=1, my favourite kind of proof.
Luckily, I am not Nick Bloom - I generate plenty of better ideas from home
Sprint planning sessions can be hard to get everyone engaged, but it isn't impossible. Retro can be remote, the biggest issue has been, is, and always will be teams that have no control and are dependent on other teams to do anything, don't write their own tickets and don't have an easily viewable plan that they can work towards.
Location has nothing to do with that.