It seems most employers want their employees back in the office I cannot speak for all of you, so chime in with your comments, but from what leadership I interact with, it is clear that employers want us to go back in. I also know that plenty of employees would like to go back in and regain the option of keeping work at work. 

In my experience, though, these are folks who are parents and have been struggling with doing work at home. Not us child-free folks. But, in general, a lot of us would be in that category: I would prefer not to. It’s simple. We were flexible and took work home when you needed us to, employers. Then we designed our entire lives around doing work from home and set everything up, made good progress. We delivered during a pandemic. And now you want us to change our lives again? I say, let’s take a breath. 

Employers are not generally involved in the nitty-gritty of what day-to-day work looks like for us employees. Now that we are expected to come back in again, I am finding that I have to justify and make a case for why and when I would need to work from home. It seems we can’t just say, because, that’s what we do now! So, even though it might not make sense to have to rejustify this setup, I would recommend preparing to do so if you would like to keep working from home partially or completely. 

After working from home, either partially or completely, for so long, for one, you might be more set up to do stuff from home than at the office. There might be projects that you are better off doing from home because they require more concentration and less interruption. I am doing projects at home using tools, for example, that are more (or even only) accessible at home, not at work. So… of course, I can’t do them as well at work, so in order to continue them I need to have some days at home. Be prepared to explain, in detail, what things need to be done at home, on which days, and what things need to be done at work, on which days. If you want to go hybrid, like me. It can be annoying but, trust me, if you present a case, that will be more acceptable than if you expect bosses to read your mind. What I am finding is that employers want to regularly or, at least, semi-regularly see your face. 

The reasons they give mainly for wanting to do this is making sure we are not disconnected from what is going on, and for collaboration purposes. I would say that if a person did not take initiative to know what is going on, then even coming in, they might be in the dark. So by working from home successfully we actually demonstrate that we have a lot of initiative and don’t need supervision. It is the people who need supervision that would need to come in more. 

Once they are set up and know what they are doing more, they can decide what makes the best sense. The employee themself would know best about what needs to be done, not a supervisor, especially when it is about the details of how the work gets done. Same for collaboration. If you don’t deliberately collaborate, you might miss a lot of collaboration opportunities even coming in. Now, if you are new in the job, it might take more interaction initially to solidify the connections that you might leverage later on to get things done. To me, it is all about doing what is best and also whatever works best. If there is no reason to go in, one should not be forced to go in. We can avoid traffic, rush hour, and stress. 

Full blog post: 

https://howtophd.org/2021/06/the-state-of-work-from-home-what-i-know-and-what-you-are-telling-me.html