“If your staff has been working at home for more than a year, there’s no compelling reason to bring them back into an office.”
Working from home has been a huge failure. Less productivity, more screwups becuse no face to face, hard for new employees to learn from older employees, on and on.
Everyone of my business clients hate it.
What I did do, however, was shrink my office size and do more of my work at home. This started even before COVID and was driven by client needs more than anything else (I happen to live closer to my biggest clients than to my office!), but now that I've been doing it for 18 months I see no reason to go back to the way I was operating before.
I work in a STEM field, and I can tell you that over the last two years I have done a 180-degree turn on my approach to this model. Heck — just last week I sat in on a municipal zoning board meeting 150 miles away. And here’s why I don’t think we are ever going back from this: I was also available to sit in on a second one in a different state on the same evening.
At my large company, working from home has been very productive across the board. Agile teams continue all the same practices and everyone still supports them as needed. Management continues its meetings, too, and we are going to a model for a while where we might come in for a team building day or a week per quarter, but after that, it is expected to go 100% remote again, permanently.
Already, minor centers of my company around the country are 100% remote and the buildings are closed down and leases ended or buildings owned, sold.
Working from home for the past year has been pretty good for my team of 17: we process widgets basically, and the accuracy and timeliness has been the same or better than before—no draining and exhausting 3 hour daily commutes.
But my team has known each other for years—decades in some cases—and we know the work well, and we know how to be professional after years working in offices. So I hope to go back the the office in the fall (when schools finally reopen in CA) once a week, once a month—something like that.
I have two young adult children, however, who have new white collar jobs now but due to covid HAVE NEVER WORKED IN AN OFFICE. They work in their messy bedrooms half naked in bed (as they did in “bed school” aka “remote learning” in college); it’s appalling and they don’t know how to act professionally unfortunately—but they’ve literally never been in an office. Never. They live virtual, remote lives. They need mentors and in-person interactions. And they can’t meet people either!
So I hope their workplaces go back sooner rather than later, and at least once a week.