The people I spoke to who were working remotely were hoping it would continue after the pandemic.
No more commute, no more Winter commute, commute costs etc.
They found themselves to be more productive at home than at the office as it is co-workers, office politics that get in the way of productivity.
One guy mentioned the people who did the least at the office and got away with it had a much harder time working remotely.
I would think companies would be more interested in saving huge amounts of money that would otherwise be spent on commercial real estate.
I read an article in the WSJ that many companies were slowly moving into the remote work situation before the pandemic and the pandemic just accelerated the process. Looks like some of those companies are scaling back.
During the 1990s, many multinationals were already hooked up with realtime teleconferencing from one nation to another, although all the participants had to be in their respective conference rooms where the hookup was located. Now, being able to “zoom” is a logical progression.
The best-equipped companies will now be able to monitor their employee’s screen time and specific activities online, so no goldbricking. The main drawbacks are that face-to-face offers the most complex levels of human communication, especially when creativity or problem-solving with a lot of unknowns is the challenge at hand. However, the bonding that can happen between coworkers and teams is harder to achieve online.
I think if companies go mainly online, workers will try to assemble “outside” of work for team spirit, grapevine, griping and organizing, but BigBrotherTech will rat them out or silence them. That totally sucks.