People Like Working from Home, Some Bosses Don’t!

After several months of enduring remote work as a viable pandemic-era solution, many CEOs have a message for their staff: Enough. Get back to the office NOW!

I remember when the pandemic broke out, we were asked to work from home. Just to account for the time that we were supposed to be at work, we were required to send a detailed report at the end of each day, detailing everything we had done in relation to work. My boss could make video calls from time to time to ascertain that indeed we were ‘working’ from home. It took a while for all of us to settle into the new normal and for things to start feeling okay. A lot of us have settled into a routine, we are working just fine from home and we have good results of productivity to show for it.

As more people get vaccinated, a lot of countries are making plans to have employees go back from working from the offices, as they did before. Companies are now coming up with some sort of ‘get back to the office’ strategies. The bosses want employees to go back to the old normal while the employees want to keep using the new normal. Where and how will we strike some balance?

Yet some employers, particularly within the finance industry, suggest the long-term role of remote work has been overstated, and that the office will continue to serve as an important hub. “It’s not a new normal,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said at a Credit Suisse Group AG conference in February.

“It’s an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.” Jes Staley, chief executive of Barclays, voiced similar sentiments in January, describing remote working as a short-term measure that was not sustainable.

The structure of the post-pandemic work world therefore remains up in the air, despite some workers’ assumptions that office life has changed forever. It may be hard to know exactly what set-up an individual employer may choose when the time comes, but understanding why opinions are so diverse – and why some sectors are keen to have employees back in house – may help workers prepare for a future that may look different than they anticipated.