Well, it happened. After some initial positive vibes about continuing to work from home, it now appears that the company is backtracking and wanting people to come back to the office. They say that people will continue to be able to work from home multiple days a week, but I think we have started to go down the slippery slope of returning on a full-time basis. Not good. Not good.
The good news is that there are others on my team that are also keen on keeping the work-from-home schedule mostly intact. As I find myself becoming more of an outlier – no I don’t share all the happiness of going back to the office – I am working on strengthening my position by doing some research on the benefits of working remotely. One of the things that I did come across was this fantastic quote from work and organization psychologist Adam Grant.
Productivity is Purpose and Process, not Place.
That really struck a chord with me and hopefully, as my company is still working on improving its processes, it will strike a chord with others as well.
Although I had my doubts going into the world of remote work, I have come to like it and feel that I am a better, more focused, and overall more productive employee. Outside of work, the fact that I am home means more time with family, more time to complete all of the household to-dos, and just a little bit more leisure to enjoy a beer at the end of a hard day’s work.
An old professor of mine once told me something that really struck a chord with me.
He was a product of a completely different era, as he had formally retired two years before I was born, although he retained his office with his name on the door, and carried on coming in to the university to do bits of research and publish journal articles until he was in perhaps his mid-90s when his health finally deteriorated. He had therefore began his career in a completely different age, with slower transportation and less traffic.
He said to me, “Commuting is the greatest waste of time one can ever experience in this life. During that time you neither earn money nor see your loved ones. I have never, ever taken a job anywhere that was greater than a 20-minute bicycle-ride from where I lived. Anything further is sheer madness”.
In this day and age I’ve noticed people willing to travel further and further to get to work – or willing to increase their commute by an hour just to get a bigger, more expensive house. What’s the use of that big fancy house if you will never enjoy it? One job I had in particular, I realised that I spent my entire waking life outside it, simply travelling to or from it. I really don’t miss that job at all.
I think we can still apply my old professor’s pearl of wisdom to the modern day. Perhaps we need to replace “bicycle” with “car”, “train” or so on, but I think it’s important that we realise that no promotion or pay-rise is worth sacrificing your family, health and interests for. And I’d also stress that “20 minutes” should mean “20 minutes during rush-hour”. A lot of friends of mine have taken jobs, naively thinking “G**gle maps says it’s only half an hour away”, not realising that between the hours of 7 and 10am, it increases to 2-3 hours.
I also had a previous job where I could easily have done the vast majority of my work remotely (in fact, most staff could have done) – yet the CEO dogmatically and rigidly insisted all employees commute to the office and work there 9-5 Monday-Friday, regardless of whether it was necessary or not. She smugly drove a Toyota Prius to show her “dedication to the environment”, but couldn’t even contemplate that we could save the environment even more by not commuting or having a physical office in the first place. Although she was very much a “theory X” type of manager, to the point of extremism!
In my current job, much work can be done remotely. We enjoy returning to the office a few days during the week, and my current boss feels it makes us more productive doing so (and also thinks it allows us all to communicate, catch up and coordinate tasks better). I can understand that, although I believe when I’m doing office-type tasks, I’m more productive when I don’t have to travel in to work and don’t get any distractions. I think we’ve found a nice balance here so far. I can envision the point when we might end up back in the office full-time, but if each of us has dedicated office space at home, there will be no need to travel to a physical office more than once per week.
Managers in general I think need to learn to be a bit more “theory-Y”. I think those who insist rigidly on returning to the office are too “theory-X”, and either don’t have enough faith in their employees, or overestimate their own importance in getting things done. We’ve had 18 months or so of people whose jobs allow it, working from home. Those home-workers haven’t spent all that time watching cat-videos and online-shopping. We don’t need to commute when we don’t have to.