I hate the phrase “new normal” and I hate the general way in which COVID or reaction to COVID changed our lives. But one thing about this brave new world I do approve of is the trend toward working from home.
I’ve come to learn many people carry a deep-seated suspicion of remote work. I guess the notion is all these remote workers are using COVID to game the system, while they sit at home with no oversight and don’t get anything done.
I can see both sides of the issue and as with anything in life, it all depends on the specific job and person, but it’s hard for me to believe that remote work isn’t a net positive in at least certain industries, like many tech jobs and other office jobs. Even jobs that require a physical presence can often go hybrid by letting workers do their office or administrative work from home some days of the week.
I’m a web developer who was working fully remote two years before COVID. I have thought long and hard about the pros and cons.
One disadvantage is that it can get lonely. I certainly miss the camaraderie of the office, sometimes tremendously. I really miss teaching college Spanish, where I would see dozens of people during the day. But at this point with my disability, working in person would be harder and more stressful than it’s worth and not a very realistic possibility for me. But I can see how it would be a deal breaker for certain personality types — you know, normal people who are not content with staring at a screen all day.
Another disadvantage of remote work is accountability and efficiency. If managers are disconnected from their team, then you might have a bunch of people wasting time on irrelevant tasks or completely slacking off. But this largely seems to be a myth.
Inefficiencies and slacking off did not start with remote work. Office jobs have long been seen as tainted by inefficient processes, bureaucracies and lazy workers. Different strategies have been used to combat this phenomenon, perhaps most notably the “bullpen” office, where everyone works in an open space and collaborates synergistically or what have you.
The last time I worked in a bullpen office, it wasn’t bad and there was great camaraderie, but it wasn’t like how I think people imagine it — that is, lots of conversations or managers barking out commands dramatically from an office window.
It was more like a library, where everyone is working from their computers in silence, headphones on, and chatting with each other online if they’re chatting at all. 90% of the time, we all might as well have been at home. As it turns out, a room full of people talking is not all that productive when you’re trying to think, so everyone just naturally agrees to be quiet and keep to themselves. I read recently that there is a trend back to individual offices for this reason.
In my experience, the main strategy that works to keep people accountable and ensure the right work is being done is just boring old deadlines. Or milestones. Or goals. Or progress updates. Whatever you want to call it so it doesn’t sound as bad. There’s no substitute for establishing, usually in written form, what should be done and when it should be done by and using that to determine if someone is doing their job. And that doesn’t, in itself, require being in person.
People might be bad at planning deadlines or fulfilling them. But whether they are physically in an office while failing at these things is irrelevant.
Another major advantage that’s easy to underestimate when discussing this in the abstract is the ability to cut the daily commute out of one’s life. I used to loathe getting up and going to school in the morning as a kid. My brother and I were too disabled for the bus, so my mom had to drop us off at school an hour before most other students got there so she could make it to work on time. There are few other realities of modern work life that are more oppressing than the daily commute:
Just to name a few. Sure, none of these obstacles are impossible to overcome, but if you could just avoid them by working from home, why not do it? Or at least heavily consider it. Again, everyone is different and there are many factors that go into it, but man, it’s so convenient.
I suppose working in a physical office in an information sector job used to be more necessary, because you needed to be connected to a mainframe or because you needed access to company harddrives on premise or other similar concerns. For most of these jobs nowadays, those types of resources have either been fully transferred to the cloud or made available with VPNs or other remote ways of connecting, because accessing stuff while not at the office was handy for a lot of reasons beyond just the ability to work from home, such as travelling for business or working in the field.
So when COVID hit, much of the infrastructure was already in place for a lot of jobs to become remote, and overnight it became clear that we should have been doing this long before COVID.
You can hate it, judge it, or worry about it, but reality has a way of asserting itself. And in reality, many office jobs are just better done remotely. I don’t think this trend will reverse anytime soon.