I know this will be a controversial opinion, but I strongly believe that forcing people to work in an office when the option exists for them to work from home is counter-productive. There are numerous studies that show working from home is more productive than working in the office. And clearly working from home is better for general mental health for most employees as it permits flexible use of available time to fit in daily life tasks around work requirements.
But there has been a strong push back to the office since COVID, and it seems as if it is largely a done deal now. Working from home is distant memory for many workers who benefitted from in as recently as three or four years ago.
Personal perspective
I’m retired now, so I don’t work at all. But I spent the better part of a decade increasingly working from home, starting around 2010 with one or two days a week and culminating in full time work from home for the last four years of my employment. I found the arrangement to be ideal for the way my mind works, and ideal for the life I live.
I worked just as many hours as I did when I was in the office, but I could fit in time to sit on the deck in the sunshine or have a nap in the afternoon. My occasional late night for a change rollout was offset by a sleep in the next day, and my work day could start with me in my pyjamas at the kitchen counter. Medical appointments became frequent with my wife Irene’s cancer diagnosis, but I was able to keep on top of work with portable devices and hospital public Wifi.
None of this flexibility would have been possible without a corporate culture that supported the concept of remote work. Demands for in-office attendance would have left me unemployed, and those demands are now becoming increasingly common.
I suspect the loss of certain employees when in office attendance becomes mandatory is sort of the point of at least some “back to the office” mandates. Employees who are most senior in age and experience are often also the ones who most benefit from remote work. In many cases they have built their life around the idea that they don’t need to come in to the office to do their job effectively. And these elder workers are often the most expensive to keep employed, so enforcing “back to the office” guarantees a percentage of them will be lost in the shuffle.
A tragic tale that illustrates the lie
One of the most common refrains is that workers need to be in the office because interacting with each other is critical to the creative process. It leads to a rich and dynamic workspace where good ideas become better through group thinking processes. I would argue that you can get all of those benefits with good tools like Slack or similar applications.
But I don’t think the office environment really even delivers the most basic elements of human contact. This is demonstrated by the story of a Wells Fargo worker in 2024 who died in the office and whose body was not discovered for days. No one noticed their coworker was deceased. There was no shared thinking or excellence through random interactions there. I have to assume that the other workers in the office never even looked in on their coworker in their cubical for nearly four days. Grisly, but definitely illustrative of the point: corporate environments often don’t lead to rich collaborative thinking in quite the way that some executives would like people to think they do.