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Why do so many people want us back in the office?

paulitaylor.com

11–20 of 624 posts

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#11
Beside what others have mentioned.

CEOs do most of their time: meetings & talking to people. This is their job, they don't do Powerpoint, coding or anything else beside talking and meetings. Both is more draining if you do this 10h a day remotely. To my coachees there is a big push amongst CEOs to get people back in the office, they haven't defined their remote role yet.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#13
post #8

I don't care about "us" going back to the office but I definitely want to go back to the office and I am far from alone in this.

Can you discuss why you want to go back to the office?

Not the OP, but in my case it's just down to socialising with the friends I work with, and pair programming.

The latter can be done remotely but definitely isn't anywhere near as smooth or natural I find.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#14
Yeah I’d like to go back but 2 days a week. Any more and it’s over kill really. 3 other days can be used for deep work at home. I’m tech guy working in marketing...these type of people love to appear at your desk every so often in the office. Now with Slack I can just not sign in or set my status as away and reply when I want. It’s asynchronous communication and really good for “me”.

And truth is. Everyone is different. I can respect the person that prefers office environment. What we will see is greater flexibility and just less office space in the future.

The real winner outs of all this will be local communities and businesses.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#15
post #8

I don't care about "us" going back to the office but I definitely want to go back to the office and I am far from alone in this.

Can you discuss why you want to go back to the office?

Number one reason for me is the separation of work and private life. It's so much easier to keep work from creeping into my private life when it happens in a totally different place.

I also miss the social interactions, discussion with colleagues is much easier in person. Lastly, I hope it will reduce the amount of video conferences that crept up considerably.

edit: Not OP obviously.

edit2: Note: Just to make sure, I know this is personal preference and I am perfectly happy with other people being super happy and productive at home!

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#16

I don't care about "us" going back to the office but I definitely want to go back to the office and I am far from alone in this.

It seems lately that most accounts arguing in favor of going back into office immediately are throwaways.

I wonder why that is 🧐

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#17
From a government/economy perspective, office workers do contribute a lot to local businesses when they pop out for lunch, coffee, etc. While furlough schemes are gradually wrapping up (eg in the UK), reducing redundancies does depend on some level of normalcy in people's day to day spending.

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#18
I think ideally it should be up to the employee to return when they feel safe.

That being said, I look forward to going back to the office. It’ll be nice to see people again —- few people bother to turn on their video on zoom anymore for anything other than one-on-ones, myself included, and that is starting to feel alienating to me. I don’t think it’s wise having a policy that you must have video enabled, though, it’s nice being able to sprawl out on the couch and get comfortable for a particularly long, boring meeting.

Edit: to address the actual contents of the article, I think below is a better read that doesn’t reduce people’s concerns about remote working to wanting to save sandwhich shops:

https://marker.medium.com/remote-work-is-killing-the-hidden-...

Re: Why do so many people want us back in the office?

#19
post #16

I don't care about "us" going back to the office but I definitely want to go back to the office and I am far from alone in this.

It seems lately that most accounts arguing in favor of going back into office immediately are throwaways. I wonder why that is 🧐

Totally off topic, but I've never seen an emoji on HN before - maybe the restrictions on Unicode characters have been lifted?

Edit: weirdly it seems to just be that specific emoji, others don't work

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