Nobody Wants To Return To The Office - Employers Need To Stop Insisting They Do
For all of the obvious bad that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been some silver linings. The ones that come to mind for me all have to do with transforming the way people work.
I've read news stories about people who had to take time off from work to care for their kids while schools were shut down. I'm sure there are plenty of people who didn't enjoy that situation, but many people suddenly realized how much they enjoyed being home with their families. They realized how unimportant work was in their lives. They wanted to prioritize things that made them happy, such as quality time with family.
While that sort of thing seems wildly obvious, there were many people who needed a shock to their routine - such as the one the pandemic provided - for them to realize it. People get stuck on auto pilot and just keep repeating the same basic day for years. The pandemic helped them wake up and see what was really important to them.
Another accidental benefit that came from pandemic quarantines was that workers and companies realized that remote work was possible. For likely as long as people have had jobs, I'm sure people have wanted to do them from home. Certainly since computers and the internet became second nature to almost everyone.
For decades workers have been petitioning their bosses to allow them the option to work from home. Or even a hybrid work arrangement that would allow a day or two per week to be work-from-home.
But that has largely been denied.
Employers say that such things are impossible because they would be a serious detriment to productivity. Or they say that working from an office is simply the way things have always been done. They have an endless list of nonsense excuses to insist that people commute to the office to do their work. And since employers hold all of the power in the employment relationship, employees basically just have to accept it.
But during the pandemic, there were stay-at-home orders which pushed many companies to switch to remote working so that they could continue operations. The situation was that they could either stick to their guns about it being impossible to work remotely, or they could make it work in order to stay in business.
And it turned out that it is very possible for people to work from home. And nothing special happened technologically during the pandemic that made it more possible than before. It was always possible, but completely disregarded and rejected because it was different.
Now that employers were forced to give it a try, and now that workers everywhere have seen just how possible it is, people are understandably wanting to maintain the flexibility to work from home.
The work has been getting done just as well as when people commuted to an office. Employees communicate every bit as well as in person with the aid of email, chat software, and video calling. There is truly no downside.
And there is all the upside in the world. Commuting to an office is an arbitrary waste of time. Some jobs do actually require that workers be in close proximity to some specific physical object or geographic location. Factory jobs would obviously require that workers be near the machines used to produce whatever it is the factory produces. Retail workers must obviously be in the store to stock the shelves.
But for a job that is done entirely via phone or computer, there isn't anything special or necessary about being in a specific room or city. The commute is uncompensated time that is stolen from workers by employers. If the workers weren't forced to commute, that time would become the worker's free time to do with whatever they please. While they are required to commute to an office, it is time spent in service of the employer's goals, but not time paid by the company.
Commuting also usually has costs. Transportation is not cheap. Owning a car and paying for fuel is very expensive. And even if you take public transportation, you need to pay money out of your own pocket to get to where the employer has demanded you be. Unless you live across the street from your office building and can walk to work, it is almost certain you need to spend time and money commuting to work.
These two factors effectively reduce the salary or wage you receive for your job. It is a pretty crappy deal for the workers.
Being at home for the workday is also so much more comfortable than being forced to sit in an office. I have never been to an office that was luxuriously comfortable. Most offices are furnished with about as cheap of furniture as they could find. The chairs are uncomfortable. The décor is drab. The layout is the dreaded cubicle farm. There isn't anything special or appealing about the office.
Contrast that with your own home. You probably like the place. You probably keep furniture there you find comfortable. You probably chose the decorations yourself. It is an all around more pleasant place to be.
I can understand that there are surely some people who don't live somewhere that would make a great workspace. If you have noisy neighbors. Or bad lighting. Or kids that won't leave you to get your work done. Those things could make the office a preferable place. But I think that workers can adequately decide for themselves whether they can do work from home.
I actually feel that I can be far more productive when working from home. I work best in silence. In an office, there are always people talking and sounds being made. Thanks to the open air cubicle farms, you can hear just about every sound anyone makes. That is very distracting and seriously hurts my productivity.
When working from home, I control the environment. I don't have kids, which is a huge help to that end, and I am actually able to have total silence for my work. Zero distractions. For me, and lots of people who feel the same as I do, the office is where I'm most distracted and least productive.
Working from home is almost always better for the environment. Commuting often means driving or riding in a vehicle someone else is driving. Either way, the commute results in carbon dioxide emissions and all of the other pollution that goes along with that. Poorer quality air and water are bad enough, but climate change is being felt right now, and more pollution makes it worse.
Reducing the amount we drive can improve the situation. And working from home drops that amount to nearly zero. But when employers demand that workers commute to an arbitrary office location, they are essentially forcing you to pollute the Earth and speed up the climate related troubles of the world.
Changes to the climate have lots of knock on effects, such as reducing the supply of drinkable water for large portions of the globe's population and reducing crop yields and arable land. Millions of people will die as a result of climate change. In my eyes, employers who demand that their employees commute to an office are intentionally causing as much pollution as they are capable of and they should be held accountable for all of the deaths their decisions cause, the same as a company that dumps toxic chemicals into lakes or rivers.
Many companies that tried remote work experienced revenue growth. So it obviously doesn't hurt productivity enough to cause financial hurt.
If companies embraced remote work and allowed workers to choose whether they used the office or worked from home, they could probably reduce their office space and save themselves money on rent.
The company I work for sent out an anonymous employee survey. One of the questions asked how important the freedom to work remotely was to them. 88% of employees said being able to work remotely is very important to them. That about matches the sentiment I've noticed when I talk to people at other companies about how they like working from home.
My friends and family all prefer to work from home. It seems like an overwhelming supermajority of workers LOVE working from home. There is so much benefit to it, and next to no benefit at all to compulsory office use.
And yet, I have read so many business-press articles about how so many people want to get back to the office. I have to believe that is a total fabrication. They simply made it up because it is what they wanted to write. But if it was based on a real survey, who the hell did they ask? Nobody I've ever worked with or known. They must have surveyed only bosses who are talking on behalf of their employees.
And lots of employers are trying their hardest to get people back into the office ASAP, even with the pandemic continuing to exist. They talk about how valuable the culture of the office is and how it makes the team stronger. There is no culture of the office. That stuff doesn't make any sense. Culture is a naturally occurring phenomenon between people. Whatever culture they are going to have can just as easily be had digitally.
Culture cannot be artificial or forced. By insisting that there be a certain type of culture in a building they dominate, the culture they are demonstrating is that of an authoritarian regime who does not care for freedom or employees. It is the North Korea style of culture domination. That was always true, but it has become highly transparent, and lots of workers are leaving their jobs when their companies begin insisting they come back to the office. When the employers make that sort of coercive move, the workers realize it is a toxic employer and they need to leave in search of somewhere that cares more about its workers.
I think some employers want people to come back to the office because they are stuck in tradition. For all this talk about innovation and growth, they really fear anything different. It was how work happened 20 years ago, so they will insist to their last breath that it is the way it must continue to be done.
I think some employers do it because they enjoy the social interaction they have with people in the office, and since they are high enough in the power hierarchy to demand it, they make people come to the office so they have someone to hang out with. It is like a little kid on an elementary school playground throwing a fit because nobody wants to play with them.
I have heard some people say that they think employers want people to come back to the office because they want more control over employees. They need you in the office so the manager can regiment everything about your day. They can dictate the dress code. They can impose a particular break schedule. They can snoop on you any time they like. It isn't enough that the work gets done, they need to make it miserable for people. And if people continue to work from home for too long, employers fear that workers will never come back to the office, so they are desperate to get people back before it is too late.
Some employers have fully embraced the remote work model and allow it for all employees, but they seem to be the minority of companies. Most companies are trying to get people back to offices. For all the good things about working from home and all the bad things about commutes and offices, I think one of the best reasons to allow remote work is because it is what workers want.
If 88% of people want to work remotely, how is it that they are made to commute to the office? That isn't democratic. That isn't freedom. That isn't logical. It is totalitarian and ridiculous. I think the monsters making that decision against the will of almost everybody should be ashamed. I think they should see themselves accurately, as the villain of the story. Workers should organize and demand the option to work remotely. The pandemic forced it to happen temporarily, but without pressure from workers, employers are going to walk everything backwards as quickly as they can.
Have you been working from home during the pandemic? Do you, or would you, enjoy working remotely? Are there any reasons I missed above for why remote work is beneficial? Do you think I am wrong and that forcing workers to use an office is a good thing? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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