And here we are. The pandemic is over.* We return to normal. Lines in the Starbucks drive-thru. Morning radio hosts making corny jokes with traffic and weather on the 5’s. You pack lunches for your kids and have them text you from the bus stop. There’s a traffic jam on 435 on the way home.
Normal. Back the way it was.
Except we hate driving on 435. We always have. Spending $9 a day on Starbucks is ridiculous and dips into that college savings account we’ve been meaning to set up. Those morning radio hosts haven’t been funny since 1994. Over the past two and a half years, we got to wake our kids up with breakfast and watch them take classes from the other room.
It wasn’t perfect. It was damn chaos, frankly. But we muddled through and, frankly, there are a lot of things we ended up liking better working from home.
If you’re like me, you’re starting to get the “feeler” emails about coming back into the office. Others have already simply been “ordered.” Regardless of whether there is still a medical reason to keep people out of enclosed spaces, companies never liked sending everyone home. It hasn’t helped their real estate values, it hasn’t helped their stock prices, and it hasn’t helped the egos of their CEOs who have always needed people around them in the office.
You hear folks like Elon Musk accuse his workers of slacking off while working from home. You hear others talk about “half days” and “nap time.” What you don’t hear is the lack of mental stress you get for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening commuting. You get more time with your family. You get more time without having to talk to Janice from accounting at the water cooler.
The war to work on site will be the next war that divides this country and it’s going to follow right on the heels of the service workers shortage. People have started to realize their worth and that they’re not being taken seriously. And companies need to adjust. They need to increase salaries. They need to allow for hybrid or remote work. And they need to listen to their people.
There are a ton of reasons why working in an office is a better option for different types of work. And there are a lot of folks who don’t realize that’s not every type of work. Let’s take information technology for example. For 90% of IT workers, the systems they work on aren’t in the same room as they are. So they’ve been doing “remote” work for decades. It’s only recently that they haven’t been forced into a cube farm to do it. I haven’t heard one good reason IT workers need to come back to the office.
The same goes for many desk-based jobs. There are a lot of reasons to do it. And if that’s truly your culture, then fine. But you better be all in. That means making the office a slice of home. Because a lot of us aren’t going back.
Are there improvements and enhancements that can be made to make home more like the office? Sure. But ordering folks back isn’t going to do it. People will simply move somewhere that will allow it. We’ve seen the future and we’re not going back. And we’re certainly not going back via 435.
(Avoid 435 but be sure to check out Chris Kamler on Twitter, where you’ll find him spewing knowledge as @TheFakeNed)