After four years of largely working Monday to Friday at a desk in the corner of my living room, I am finally falling out of love with the great remote work experiment of 2020.
The tech giants are also moaning about it. In what feels like post-pandemic déjà vu, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently fired off a corporate memo calling on all executives to return to working in the office five days a week.
Had they not done this already? Feels like a very Bezos thing to say. In Jassy’s defense, he will know what works best for the executive teams at Amazon – presumably, they are the people directly under him. And it’s good to have visibility of the management, as was the case long before the pandemic.
Google, Dell, and Zoom have all done similar, setting a hard minimum for in-office days per week. Basically, the main proprietors of the technologies that enable us to work from home don’t want their own guys working from home.
Many, but not all, of the biggest tech firms have brought these mandates in gradually. Elon Musk made headlines in 2022 when he told staff at Tesla to return to 40-hour office weeks as a minimum or “pretend to work elsewhere”. But how much actual work is Musk getting through at his six businesses?
Seems like there is a collection of very rich people with an idea of where you and I should work. But the problem isn’t so much that we should or shouldn’t be in-office – it’s that we should be supported to do our jobs wherever we do our best work.
The issue with these stories of remote work is the noise that follows, often filled with unfounded and under-researched opinions. Those who say working from home leads to a drop in productivity and or a lack of career progression, for example, are ignoring research that says the exact opposite.
What irritates me though, is this idea that people are procrastinating while working from home. It’s annoying to me because the main thing I miss about being in the office is the procrastination in the name of building friendly team relationships. I miss the gossip, the trips to the pub, the five-minute walk between meeting rooms, and the days when people brought a cake in for their birthday.
The company I work for owns FourFourTwo magazine, which means there are a bunch of people at a desk on one of the floors in my office that I can ask if they saw the “ludicrous display last night?” Except I can’t, because I’m not there.
Now, I regularly get triggered when people share in-office treats over the corporate comms. They did ‘Taco Thursday' recently and I swear to you, I had to fight back the tears.
It’s these moments though, little breaks in the slog of the job, that helped me do it. Burnout will come if you sit in front of the same screen for eight hours a day. You notice the strain if you have two virtual meetings back to back – it’s surprisingly taxing.
Many hybrid workers – like myself – might just like being close enough to get their kids from school on time. For me and my wife, there is a constant negotiation on who can get them on this day and the next. This is largely because we’re a mad society that didn’t think to match school hours with the average working day – why do they get so much holiday?
In this sense, ‘flexibility’ isn’t mentioned much when it comes to flexible working. Instead, return to office (RTO) mandates seem to fly out with little idea about the people being mandated. According to a Flex Index survey of 2,670 firms from August, 79% of companies offered completely flexible working arrangements, but only 56% had an “employee choice” model.
Even the surveys of remote workers have flaws. Yes, the majority might say they prefer working from home, but in reality, it isn’t the work as such, it’s more the preference to not spend x amount of money every day to squeeze themselves on the Central Line in rush hour. I’ll make that journey if I have to, but only if there are tacos and cake waiting on the other end.
