There’s Actually No Good Reason for Us All to Go Back to the Office

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There’s Actually No Good Reason for Us All to Go Back to the Office

Productivity and quality of life are not mutually exclusive. There are good reasons to let people work from home forever. Joel Nihlean Jan 29·7 min read

Working outdoors in Prague (Photo by Martin Vorel)

Remember when the idea of working from home every day (or any) made management clutch its pearls? It was an issue of technology, the policies, the logistics, or the company culture… or a dozen other excuses. Then the pandemic hit.

As it turns out, your company’s rules about working from home weren’t about what was practical or necessary to get the job done. They were more about the outdated management philosophies — neuroses? — of your boss.

Our coronavirus-induced experiment in long-term work from home has proven largely a success. Office employees and knowledge workers can do most office work from home or almost anywhere there’s an internet connection. That’s why the moves by some companies to get everyone back to the office seem so nonsensical.

The expectations of work-life balance have been forever changed. According to Gallup, most Americans working from home want to keep doing so “as much as possible” after the pandemic ends.

People are happier, more efficient, saving money, they’re less stressed, and they have more time for family, and for themselves. They can work out, cook healthier meals, read a book, focus on a hobby. They have an overall better quality of life.

Twitter was one of the first to announce it would let employees work from home permanently. The list of companies allowing work from home forever has kept growing.

The genie is out of the bottle, but some bosses will want to try to put the genie back. Workers will need to fight to keep these benefits when the pandemic ends.

Your boss’ reasons to return to the office are bad

Returning to the office is the ultimate “we’ve always done it this way” move. Making workers return to the office now is the same as implementing a pay cut and a cut in benefits. Not great for morale!

Working from home permanently, or even just most of the week, improves lives and makes sense. But employers won’t shift to a remote-first footing without opposition.

The good news is that the toughest part of transitioning to a remote-first model has already been achieved. It might be hard for some stubborn executives to let go of the past once the pandemic is over, but there’s just no going back.

Seeing everyone at all times is a management shortcut. Butts in seats is a bad metric for productivity. Companies need to find more effective ways of measuring performance. The best measure of productivity is output, not time.

Improved productivity and a better quality of life are not mutually exclusive. That hasn’t stopped companies from coming up with reasons they want to bring everyone back to the office.

Your company has an existing lease

Commercial lease agreements can run from an average of six and a half years to 10 years. And just like a residential lease, they can be expensive to get out of. Pinterest paid nearly $90 million to break its office lease.

But just because your company is stuck in a lease it can’t get out of shouldn’t mean you need to come back to fill the office space. If someone higher up thinks the space is going to waste, they should get creative. Nashville-based MediCopy converted their offices into training space, saving $350,000 in leasing costs. Employees are now working from home long term.

Your company’s lease isn’t your problem. Unused office space isn’t your problem either. Asking employees to commute into an office every day to do work that could have easily been done from home is disrespectful. It’s a waste of time — an average of an hour or more a day for most commuters in the U.S. — plus your money in gas and vehicle maintenance.

Your company’s HR team wants to bring back the social aspects of work

Many of us — even some introverts — have missed the in-person social interaction during the pandemic. While most of us have proven we can do our job more effectively from home, employers seem to want people back in the office to build team camaraderie. The thought is that working from home doesn’t deliver the same social benefits needed to build strong teams that the office provides.

The fun, games, and lavish perks HR provides are there to build a competitive company culture that attracts talent. It’s all in service of making the office an enticing place to spend as much time as possible. This office-centric view of team-building fails to take into account online community-building. Yammer, Slack, and a dozen other tools help keep teams connected.

Nobody really wants those awkward office parties, or newly-remodeled break rooms with nap pods, bean bags, bookshelves, board games, and ping pong tables. With the push for ever-increasing productivity, who has time to take advantage of that stuff anyway?

Most people don’t want more playful offices, they want to be treated like adults. Trust, flexibility, and autonomy are what employees need to produce their best work, not endless free snacks, trivia games, and a beer fridge.

Working from home isn’t the ideal situation for some employees

Although the majority of office workers say they want to keep working from home, it’s not ideal for everyone. Some people might not be able to do every aspect of their job from home. Others might not have a place in their home conducive to getting work done.

Extroverts thrive on the social interactions of the office. You know who they are. They’re the ones who pop in on co-workers to turn an instant message or email into a 20-minute conversation. Extroverts may not be cut out for full-time work from home. There’s evidence that extroverts don’t adapt well to remote work. Without the constant motion and office chatter, they can lose motivation and their productivity suffers.

The beauty of knowing we can work effectively from anywhere is that some of us can choose to go back to work in the office once the pandemic is over. The chatty extroverts can head back to the cubes, drop in on one another and talk each other into oblivion.

The office is a one-size-fits-all solution that has its origins in the 18th century. Just as the pandemic highlighted that some students thrive in the online environment in ways they didn’t in the classroom, some employees are thriving in the work from home world. Knowing this, returning to a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t make much sense.

Your company relies heavily on collaboration

A big argument for keeping employees honeycombed into cubicles is that the random conversations and interruptions of the open office concept lead to great ideas. Everyone needs to be in earshot for the impromptu meetings that could arise. This notion that in-person meetings are necessary for effective collaboration and innovation is an absolute myth.

Big in-person group meetings for collaboration and brainstorming — still widely practiced at organizations big and small — don’t work. Evidence shows these meetings don’t capture the best ideas, and they actually lead to a loss in productivity.

In practice, what we call collaboration is often just a disruption. The impromptu meetings and desk drive-bys pull people out of a flow that is often hard to return to. We need to work as a team and communicate with one another, but instant responses just aren’t necessary 99.99% of the time.

Working from home focuses us on the work that really matters. The isolation lets people better regulate what used to be interruptions. This is one of the reasons knowledge workers are more productive from home. You can hop on a Zoom call or send a message, and address emails and other requests at your pace, without interrupting your flow.

Companies that fight the future will lose

The technology is there to handle the remote work, and it’s proven successful in the last year. Remote-first offices are the future.

Companies can either embrace this now, or fight it and lose anyway. They’ll shift to remote-first in the end. The question is how many employees they run off resisting change.

Working from home saves employees money and improves their quality of life. It boosts company productivity and broadens the talent pool beyond the 30-mile radius of the office. Plus, work from home provides the unparalleled perk of working in pajamas. It’s a win-win.

zip222 on June 16th, 2021 at 11:46 UTC »

Being able to work at home on days when you’re expecting a delivery, or have a home maintenance appointment, or not having your coworkers sharing germs with you because they were pressured into being in the office, are all awesome perks.

AWildDesignerAppears on June 16th, 2021 at 05:25 UTC »

Honestly, I think it all comes down to freedom of choice, that's why I think most people align with the hybrid option. There are days I prefer to be in the office to collaborate in person or attend a large team meeting and there are days where I want to work from home, save myself a commute and spend the day working next to my wife and our two wonderful dogs.

sonic_tower on June 16th, 2021 at 03:26 UTC »

I value in person office work, but also value having my garden and no commute. Why can't we just let people work from home if they want? Why can't we open smaller offices in places people can afford and actually want to live in?

San Jose CA is the most expensive city in America, but does anyone actually want to to live there?