There’s no right or wrong answer.
I do think though that WFH is a bit like a boiling frog situation in many instances, and often people don’t realise it until something changes.
For many people, working from home means being able to have a social life during working hours. Going out to the gym, having a coffee, picking up the kids, and the reality is that many work hours are lost. But for those people it’s a convenience which means having to spend less time at their desks.
But for others in customer facing rolls, call centres, webchat services etc it’s a different story.
I WFH full-time. I have a disability and it has been ideal. I don’t have to commute. I can go straight into my office and I’m at home as soon as I log out. And I have a dedicated workspace, so there’s no overlap between my home and work environment. I am also fairly recently immune suppressed following a transplant, and so WFH gives me the opportunity to not have to come into contact with to many germs, especially in the first year which is the most crucial. But….
I’ve worked for the same company for 3.5 years. During that time I’ve spent every day talking to customers, initially on digital webchat, and then on the phone. I did all my training remotely. I am good at my job. But there’s no opportunity to pop out for coffee or the gym etc, I’m there to work, my office is my office and I get two ten minute breaks and a lunch break. If I’m on not available for more than a couple of minutes management want to know why. Ditto comfort breaks.
Again, it’s an ideal situation on the face of it.
But in those 3.5 years I’ve never met a single one of my colleagues in person. Not one.
I also live mostly alone. My DC are here, but mostly not, and so it’s possible to go days without seeing another human being in person.
And whether people admit it or not. Talking to people on teams and the phone isn’t the same.
And it took me spending 4 months in hospital where I spoke to people every single day to realise how isolated I had become.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to me, because I was working, it’s what I do and it was convenient.
And then I came home, and back to work, and am back to not seeing people. My customers are now on the phone, so I do at least physically speak to people, as opposed to when I worked in a digital team and I spent all day typing to them instead.
But still there is no physical interaction with actual people.
Staff who work closer to the office are now highbrid as the company changed its policy from full-time wfh where they hired people all across the countries.
And those who were told to go into the office two days a week were absolutely furious at first. They objected to having the rules changed, although most of them had come from working in a full-time office environment to WFH in lockdown and had got used to the new culture.
And within weeks of having to go back staff started to say how much they realised they’d missed interacting with people in a real environment.
They all work highbrid still and still enjoy working from home. But they do now admit that going into the office has benefited many of them mentally.
There’s no right or wrong really.
But I do think that we need to think about what this level of isolation is doing to us as a society.
We now live in an era where people are communicating ore and more via social media and online, via teams etc, and we’re losing the ability to communicate in person.
And as social animals, what is that going to do in the long term?
WFH works, but we do need to look at the bigger picture. Because the truth is that most people’s interactions happen at work, and now we’re seeking to remove those. So where are those interactions going to come from? Or should we just accept that actually humans should now be solitary beings?