Going back to the office? See it as a chance to have the best of both worlds

Mary Kenny

Back to business: Workers are returning to the office after months of working from home. Credit: Luis Alvarez

October 04 2021 07:03 AM

You know what? I’d love to be putting on my coat and going off to an office today. I look back on my days of working with colleagues as among the most rewarding, merry and gregarious passages of my life.

It was great working in collaboration with other people. It was enrichening to learn from older colleagues and to be stimulated by the innovatory ideas of younger ones.

It was fab having an office lunch that sometimes went on just a little too long and may have involved a little too much libation — only very occasionally, of course — and it was cheering to feel a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps with colleagues.

It was helpful to understand the purpose of a business, or enterprise, and even to acquire a sense of loyalty to the corporate identity. It was good to share in the joys and woes of office pals.

Sometimes, yes, office politics — who had advanced their career by some crafty move? — and office gossip were on the negative side of the ledger and some women complained of men who were sex pests. But most people I’ve ever worked with, male and female, were grand and many remained life-long friends.

For me, an office friendship even developed a dynastic element, as my son married the daughter of old colleagues and we are now co-grandparents, who can share hilarious memories of our youthful days toiling together in a newspaper office.

However, times have, quite naturally, changed and working practices have altered with them. Electronic communications had their impact — the internet really took off for most people around 2008. Then came the Covid pandemic, which introduced a new lifestyle under the heading of WFH (Working From Home).

It wasn’t an entirely new lifestyle: there have always been individual freelancers who worked from home and family businesses were historically operated from a home base. But the pandemic made the WFH habit into a normal practice for so many.

Now that the pandemic is, we hope, abating and a semblance of “normal” life is returning, many people don’t want to return to the office, or plant.

Who wants to go back to the stress — and expense — of the daily commute? Who wants to struggle with the house prices and rental costs of city life when you can now live in stunning locations in the countryside for far less and conduct all your business via electronic channels?

Working from home has been a much-needed boost to rural areas, where life is calmer, neighbours are often nicer and houses are more affordable.

Everywhere, people have reported a better work-life balance with the experience of working from home. Small wonder a UK study found that only about 15% of the working population wants to return to an office, or other workplace, full-time.

What most people choose is a hybrid approach to a working life: they want to be able to organise part of their working life from home, while being physically present, some of the time, at a communal workplace.

Hopefully, this can be a model for the future, as I believe it would be a great loss to human experience if the WFH model were to become the dominant one.

One of the benefits, for women, of going to the office, or place or work, was getting away from the kitchen sink. At its most ideal, home life is lovely, but you also need to get away from your own four walls on a regular basis.

One of the downsides of the WFH practice is that women have taken on more domestic responsibilities, since they are in the environment of the home so continuously.

A rise in domestic abuse is also commonly reported: there’s no excuse for it, but being locked up with a spouse 24/7 is surely a cause of exasperation, even in the best of relationships.

Individuals differ and some people are very happy with a remote working arrangement. Companies have also found it helps keep costs down — from office rental space to the provision of equipment.

Moreover, productivity has held up pretty well over the course of the pandemic and remote working is now being encouraged and promoted by a number of agencies who see it as the “new normal”.

(Although it’s obvious that there are some jobs and professions that cannot be organised remotely, from farming to hospitality to medical care.)

I hope that, even in the spheres where WFH is entirely satisfactory, there will remain a dimension of working together. Humans need the human touch. They need to meet together, talk together, feel, touch and even sense the chemistry of a collective encounter.

Ideas are born, working partnerships spark and even romances can flourish when people are engaged in a communal effort of meaningful labour — in an office.