I wrote a piece on the wfh vs office debate back in June 2020. I’ve just been re-reading it. It seems like I didn’t like working from home back then, probably because at the time I was using a rented Mac and I was holed up in my poor daughter’s bedroom, and there was very little work about. I was about 2-3 weeks away from finishing a job, when all the staff in the sales and marketing team where I was working went home and stayed there. I think prior to that the HR advice was to keep coming into the office, and I honestly believe they’d forgotten about me (there was no ‘studio’ to speak of, just me and some marketing managers).
I found the whole thing enormously frustrating – the IT system at the booking was incredibly restrictive if you weren’t a full-time employee so using Teams (new to me at the time) was a right faff let me tell you. I’d also bought my first smart phone (I could never be classed as an early adopter) and the ’answer’ function was unnecessarily complicated. Why I couldn’t just tap ‘answer’ is still a mystery now and I’ve had the bloody phone for over 3 years.
Perhaps it was because the situation was foisted upon me – upon everyone really – and I was mentally unprepared for it. Getting on for 3 years later and I’ve really enjoyed the mix of being in and out of the office. Now I would suggest that we move on from the home v office debate and come out in support of hybrid working. That is, working in different places on different days, but maintaining communication with our colleagues.
There are plenty of voices speaking out against working from home, and there are probably twice as many voices telling us the office is dead, and I’m not convinced this is a generational thing. Some people find the social interaction of an office excruciating and not particularly helpful to them completing their work, but after just 2 weeks of being completely at home, my tiny desk and laptop set up in front of the bookshelf in my living room, I was climbing the walls. But then that’s not the experience of many freelancers, who may well have committed to spending their hard-earned on a garden office, or loft, or a room that they can close the door on at the end of the day, and this is what I understand to be hybrid working.
The negativity aimed at those not in the office supposes workers are at home with the telly on, not actually doing any work. If you are a line manager who thinks this way then might I suggest you need to improve the relationship you have with your colleagues? Surely you know what to expect from them each and every day, and you would immediately notice if a task you had given them hadn’t been done? The narrative of wfh loafers just doesn’t make sense. If you don’t know what to expect from your team at the end of the day, you probably shouldn’t have given them a job in the first place.
But hang on. Why would you want to be away from your office all the time? That’s weird. You’re telling me you can’t even bring yourself to go into the office at least once a week to have face-to-face informal team meetings, the kind that knocks those god-awful Teams calls into a cocked hat? The hesitancy, the inadvertent mutes, the talking over each other, sorry, after y- no sorry, after you- no sorry etc and so forth. Hybrid working needs to succeed, to convince cynics that we are committed to our work but some time away from the office across the working week will do both you and your employer a favour. It’s probably not a lot to ask to turn up and do a round of teas now and again.
Links:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/multi-millionaire-charlie-mullins-says-25303320
you are not special 