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I've discovered that I need to be in a different place. I'm going to be checking emails in the evening regardless of which place I worked at during the day anyway.
Like many others, I enjoy the company of my colleagues, but the big plus of working in the office for me is that the office is a place where my work happens that is separate from my home. While the lack of commute and parking issues has been nice, it's also nice to walk out of the office and leave work behind at the end of the day.
This. A lot of my work was collaborative and benefitted from spontaneous discussions an office setting encouraged. I liked the separation to leave the office at the office. Much of my work also required access to historic or paper references. No way could I haul all of that material home on the off chance I might need it. I have multiple pets and ongoing projects at home and could easily find too many things to distract my thinking if I worked from home. Most of my houses wouldn't have a definable workspace either. Granted, I haven't had many opportunities to work from home, but the few times I did for some reason I wasn't as productive or focused.
If your job can be done on auto-pilot, there's really no reason to be in an office except maybe for the social aspect and to get some changes of scenery over the course of the day. My job requires a high degree of often spontaneous collaboration, and when it comes to the quality and pace of collaborative results, Chat and Zoom are absolutely no match for face-to-face interaction.
And there's something to be said for having a clear delineation between work life and home life. Sometimes I end up interspersing both throughout the course of the day, and as a result I have to stay logged in at work until 8 or 9 pm to ensure I've put in a full 8-hour day. When I go into work, I work, then I come home, and I'm done for the day.
I suspect it's also better for career development to be networking face-to-face. We just had a wave of promotions at work, and it's probably no coincidence everyone who was eligible for a promotion and regularly shows up for our "theoretically optional but highly encouraged" in-person office days got promoted while several who have not returned did not. The bosses got to know us a lot better on a "human" level than those who have declined to return to the office.
If your job can be done on auto-pilot, there's really no reason to be in an office except maybe for the social aspect and to get some changes of scenery over the course of the day. My job requires a high degree of often spontaneous collaboration, and when it comes to the quality and pace of collaborative results, Chat and Zoom are absolutely no match for face-to-face interaction.
And there's something to be said for having a clear delineation between work life and home life. Sometimes I end up interspersing both throughout the course of the day, and as a result I have to stay logged in at work until 8 or 9 pm to ensure I've put in a full 8-hour day. When I go into work, I work, then I come home, and I'm done for the day.
I suspect it's also better for career development to be networking face-to-face. We just had a wave of promotions at work, and it's probably no coincidence everyone who was eligible for a promotion and regularly shows up for our "theoretically optional but highly encouraged" in-person office days got promoted while several who have not returned did not. The bosses got to know us a lot better on a "human" level than those who have declined to return to the office.
I think that may change as WFH becomes the norm, also the pandemic has shown many companies that workers tend to be more productive from home and I know of a few midsized companies have downsized their office space or started leasing out floors in their office buildings that they own for extra revenue with the space that opened up.
I'm in favor of WFH ( ), but I have had recent coworkers who preferred at the office.
Coworker 1's kids were being home-schooled by his wife. He found WFH to be too distracting, under those circumstances. We were allowed to WFH in the event of bad weather. He preferred to either 1.) Try to come in, or 2.) Just call in if it was *too* dangerous.
A current coworker wouldn't mind WFH, but right before the pandemic, he and his wife downsized after their last child moved out. They moved into a 1 bedroom apartment, and set up a corner for his wife (who had been WFH for years before the pandemic). Then the pandemic hit, and he had to WFH as well, and he and his wife were tripping all over each other. If they'd still been in the house they'd had, he said it would've been fine. (He's not opposed to WFH, he'd like to, it's just his current living situation makes it less than ideal.)
There's a few folk in other departments who live in an area that doesn't get great internet, so they prefer being in the office. (Really caused some frustration for them when they *did* have to WFH during the pandemic.) To clarify, it's not that they didn't have internet, they just couldn't get some of the faster speeds in their areas. Since our company didn't allow WFH prior to the pandemic (except for things such as weather), it wasn't really something any of them thought about. Nobody expected to be WFH for over a year.
Having experienced working from home the past year and a half, I would love to have a 100% work from home job.
I've never been a people person so prefer being by myself with no distractions. So long as I have work to do, I have no problems self motivating myself. If there's no work to do makes no difference to me being in the office or at home.
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I think this is the big drawback for wfh is being self motivated to focus ON the job. When you have to be in the office, you're set for a period of time,, but at home, it could vary widely.
Having experienced working from home the past year and a half, I would love to have a 100% work from home job.
I've never been a people person so prefer being by myself with no distractions. So long as I have work to do, I have no problems self motivating myself. If there's no work to do makes no difference to me being in the office or at home.
One really great thing about remote is having meetings on zoom. I have a terrible fear of public speaking, but I don't have that same fear having to speak virtually to the audience.
Something I learned about WFH the past year was that I have no problems motivating myself to do my work, and I have no problems shutting down at the end of the work day and leaving the work computer completely alone and forgetting about everything til the next morning.
The thing with my job is that it goes in 'waves'--there's days I'm insanely busy, and then there's days where I don't have a darn thing to do because I'm waiting on other departments to finish their part before it gets to me/gets back to me. In a perfect world, my workload would flow in such a way that I'm steadily busy without being overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but it doesn't happen that way. (It's the nature of the job, not just me. My coworkers go through the same thing.) The days where I'm insanely busy, I don't tend to mind being in the office so much, but the days where I'm waiting, I do. I'd make minding my work computer a priority, but on those slow days when I'm WFH, I can take a few minutes to load the dishwasher, or vacuum the living room, or do a quick five-minute exercise program from the TV. In other words, nothing that would take me away from my 'work mode' for very long, but would be more productive than just sitting in an office doing *nothing*, and give me some mental breaks. When it's dead, and I'm in the office, I'm just stuck sitting there.
I was reluctant to WFH initially because I thought it was important to maintain that face to face contact with peers & managers. As I adjusted to WFH life, I realized that I could still maintain contact through Webex/zoom or whatever platform we are using. I schedule routine gatherings with work friends, and go the the gym nightly for my social needs.
We WFH long before the pandemic.
I’m an introvert so I always hate the morning chit chat, and the interruptions for questions. I have no problem focusing at home, and can easily fit in a dog hug while maintaining my productivity.
I guess the only downside is excessive long hours,but I’d rather do those at home than in the office. And sometimes I refuse to go into the office for my personal work on the weekends.
Now, I can’t even entertain the idea of going in to the office. Thankfully, I don’t have to.
I think that may change as WFH becomes the norm, also the pandemic has shown many companies that workers tend to be more productive from home and I know of a few midsized companies have downsized their office space or started leasing out floors in their office buildings that they own for extra revenue with the space that opened up.
I don't take for granted your premise WFH will be the norm, at least not permanently. I also don't take for granted workers tend to be more productive from home.
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), but I have had recent coworkers who preferred at the office.
