I really much appreciate this aspect of the pandemic. The "home office revolution" has long been possible, but still would not have happened for a long time without COVID.
People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.
It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you're always with your family. On the other hand, you're always with your family.
Fact of life is, many relationships have trouble finding balance between "me time" and "us time". Going to work is, for many, a way to catch a break from their home - with perfect plausible deniability, since it's socially approved and demanded externally.
Some people don't need it. I had a co-worker who would come super-early in the morning, so he could leave early and spend time with his kids. At work, we could see his kids were his whole world, and he was always happy. But at that same job, I also had a different co-worker who went out his way to find reasons to stay overtime - he dreaded coming back home. I don't keep in touch with them much, but I imagine the former one was super-happy about forced WFH, but the latter very much not.
Add to that, quite a lot of people in cities bought their apartments on the assumption that both partners are working 9/5 at the office and the kids are at school/daycare - this let them buy smaller places for less (or closer to work). Such apartments become living hell when all dwellers are present simultaneously for the entire day, and each is trying to do their work/school.
This is not to trade who has it worse - just pointing out that it's not smooth sailing for those of us with families either. There's a tight line between being happy to have people around, and hating their guts for it - this pandemic pushed a lot of us close to that border.
Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc.
The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get it that alone time is extremely important. I practice it as well -- my wife too. But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Please understand that none of this is meant to offend or generalize. But what you describe is just legitimately baffling for me.
> Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc.
For most 20-30yo, the 9-5 lifestyle is absolutely expected to be there for the next 30 years. Vacations are often handled by traveling, visiting extended family, etc. There normally are many options available. And by the time retirement comes, children will have moved out, or perhaps the parents will have sold the flat, or left it to the children, and moved out elsewhere. I don't think there is something as a "lifelong estate purchase" these days in the cities. Not when you're in your thirties.
> The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Easy to say :). But some people only discover that quite late - once some unpredictable circumstances (like job loss, or a global pandemic) force them to actually stay in the same flat for long periods of time. Most working-age adults don't experience that ordinarily (and I think every couple expects they'll work such issues out by the time they get to retire).
> But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Relationships are complex, and every one is different. They get even more complex if extended family gets involved, or when children appear. And sudden events like a global pandemic have a way of revealing previously unseen cracks in the foundations. If people were aware of all this up front, humanity would have died out centuries ago :).
>For most 20-30yo, the 9-5 lifestyle is absolutely expected to be there for the next 30 years.
I would be very careful making any claim going as far as the next 30 years, given what has happened in the last 2 years, let alone in the last century. If that wasn't enough to convince my fellow 20-30yos, nothing's going to shake them awake to how volatile life can be.
> But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day.
I think most people around my age in Europe (in their thirties) started working around 25, at the latest, and will work until they're at least 65. Probably later, since in many countries the retirement age is starting to be indexed with life expectancy. It's quite realistic that by the time I retire I will have worked 50+ years.
> Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc.
Simple answer: You aren't locked into a home for life, so you buy a home for the life you want now. My parents are on the verge of retiring, so they bought a beach condo and plan to sell off their suburban home.
My wife and I are looking at smaller city homes, but definitely do not plan to retire in it, we're looking at maybe a 5-10 year timespan of ownership.
> Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5.
The extra time spent commuting from a distant house are real costs paid every day. The potential of owning a home that you can retire in is a hypothetical payoff many many years in the future.
Because it costs a lot of money to buy a house with enough room for 2 separate offices. Paying for that if you have no reason to believe you'll ever need it would be well into the stupid range for most people.
You need a place to live now. You can always sell it later - perhaps at a profit, perhaps at a loss - but a place to live optimized for your current conditions will let you save up money to buy a better place later, that will be optimized for your future conditions.
Prior to the pandemic, if you and your spouse both had jobs where you worked in company offices, then paying extra for a house that would support home offices for both of you is a huge expense. If you think every couple should do so just because they might both need to work from home some day, then you seriously overestimate how much extra money most families have available. Or underestimate how much money those extra rooms add to the cost of a house.
Family is fine, but working from home while my neighbors in the neighboring apartments are also all at home with their children - is too much.
Also, construction. I currently have two construction sites in my 100 meter radius. It's almost like they compete who can use the jackhammer more.
Is all of that loneliness from WFH or can some be attributed to National lockdowns and limits on social interaction outside your household?
In a post Covid world, WFH could involve coworking spaces and cafes. I expect that industry will grow massively over the coming years as we migrate into a more distributed working style. It’s a new way of doing things things and it’s going to take time to adapt and replace the social side of the office.
Exactly. I “worked from home” for several years before covid, but I never worked exclusively at home until covid. I’d usually spend a few hours of a few days a week at a coffee shop, library or park, and not being able to do that during covid has definitely made remote work feel more isolating.
While there‘s truth to that, it doesn‘t bring home my own issue with WFH: It might be okay to much better for individual contributors, but it‘s harsh for me as a manager.
Zoom (fatigue) meetings all day, staring at the screen instead of real people and any form of "managing by walking around" and watercooler chats are gone.
This might not make a difference if my job was a corporate mess and sucked before already, but for people like me who actually enjoy their peers, it‘s a net negative.
I feel completely out of touch with what happens in the company and everything feels super transactional.
I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.
Sure, we could adjust to an even more asynchronous workflow like the poster child remote companies, but to me it would make this issue even worse.
I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
> And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.
That is the short term goal. But it isn't the only goal. I want my reports to trust me so that if things change or they are having problems that they'll be honest with me and provide feedback so I can make things better. I want my reports to feel valued and emotionally satisfied with their work. This means understanding their career goals and what makes them feel happy so I can make sure that they get the kinds of rewards that matter to them. These sorts of things are important for the long term sustainability of a team even if a team is delivering efficiently at a given moment.
Good one, actually most of my employees feel the same way.
You might have a bad case of a micromanager there, but here‘s my definition:
> Management by walking around emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance in the workplace.
I started doing the "walking around" bit after negative feedback ~20 years ago, and stopped again pretty soon after it was clear that while it works, it's a band-aid for getting people confident that it's ok to talk to you whenever, and the real problem was that I'd been pretty burnt out and shut myself off for a while, not that I didn't literally walk the room.
With remote teams what I've done as a workaround with some teams have been to enforce a short 1-on-1 weekly, and tell people if we don't have anything to talk about, then we make it brief. It prevents team members who are reticent about taking your time from having issues build up because they feel it's too small or too personal to schedule a meeting about when they have a time slot they know you'll schedule regardless. For some it was almost always a 5 minute annoyance of me asking if there were any issues, them saying they had nothing to talk about, and for us to leave it at that. But it acted as a safety valve, and every now and again something absolutely critical would get brought up in those calls.
And many times when they had "nothing" to talk about, I'd ask them followup questions about small stuff like e.g. how they got on with specific people, or how a certain project was going, and suddenly it turned out they had plenty of things to talk about.
In teams where you know everyone will speak up, you can dial back both the actual and "virtual" walking of the room, knowing they'll come and tell you, but "walking the room" effectively acts as a way of lowering the barrier to bring up an issue, because they're not "bothering you".
I started a job as a manager during the pandemic, with everyone working from home. It sucked. On top of the usual difficulties with onboarding remotely, I had to deal with getting to know everyone around me in a 360 degree sphere, and forming relationships when most people had already been able to get to know each other in person.
Can not wait to get back to being able to meet people in person, even if remote and WFH is allowed and accepted in the future, which I think it will be for all but the most dinosaur of companies.
> I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.
Some indeed do, but for some reason it requires more effort than meeting physically did. I never did that, but I had co-workers who did it regularly even pre-pandemic.
What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).
But I wonder if there's a space for managers to create a second off-topic channel for their team - one that contains the manager as well. Most of the casual talk will of course stay on the original #random (the boss/subordinate separation cannot be bridged, everyone knows it's there even if they pretend it's not), but the #random+boss chat could capture the kind of conversations you'd ordinarily have on the corridor/around the doors to your office. I know I had plenty of semi-casual chats like this IRL with my boss back in my office days, and they were good for morale. I think this concept didn't translate well into pandemic/forced-WFH world.
Of course, if you don't like casual IMing and prefer synchronous communication, then that's not an option for you.
> I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
I sympathize. I hope this will end soon, and that we all find balance again. Your company may not return to full-office, but when the restrictions end, it'll be easier to see people IRL even if everyone's mostly working from home.
For what's worth, I'm more on the introvert end, and yet I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of losing my mind - we introverts have limits, too, and this pandemic situation is stressing them.
> What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).
Why is that? At all the companies I have worked at the managers would join in with these kind of things same as everyone else (not all of them, but then not of all the ICs were interested either).
You're asking that as a manager or employee? If the former, I suspect there were channels you didn't know about. If the latter, I don't know - but maybe they were channels you didn't know about :).
But the reason is, these chats are for conversations you won't feel comfortable having with your boss around. Cat pictures, stupid jokes, random topics. Even if people felt comfortable with such topics around their manager, they might still be worried that the volume of communications will be seen by the manager as evidence that people are slacking off.
There's pros and cons. But I've seen it be useful for teams to have a "manager-free" space where they can shoot the breeze and complain about stuff without feeling like they are being watched or judged or that their complaints will be taken too urgently.
> without feeling like they are being watched or judged or that their complaints will be taken too urgently.
I guess my feeling is that if your manager is doing that then they aren't a good manager (of course there are plenty of not-good managers, but it's not part and parcel of being a manager)
I'm introverted, and generally have most of my social interactions online. I like interacting with people, but it's draining to the point that I've loved working from home 80%-100% the last several years, and rarely go out other than for errands and to meet my girlfriend. First lockdown was an absolute breeze for me. I loved the solitude.
Yet the subsequent lockdowns have been enough even for me to nudge me into what feels like (very) mild depression. Low-level enough that it's a nuisance rather than a problem, and I'm confident it will just go by itself once I am able to spend more time doing other things, but nevertheless it's a noticeable deterioration in mood and happiness level.
I can't imagine what it must be like for people with stronger social needs... It's also the main thing that keeps me from getting judgemental about people skirting lockdown restrictions.
You're not alone. I just couldn't work without a varied selection of places to work from. I kind of froze, and couldn't bring myself to wake up and go 2 meters to my desk and work all day. The office was worse, but having coffee shops to go to was my previous solution.
It's been very cold to be tryping in the park as well! It's getting better now, but is still not ideal. I have particularly cold extremities so it's very painful to type in that weather.
I think the co-working space could grow in some really interesting ways. However, in traditional companies the budget for office space tends to be out of the control of normal employees. People will have to choose between the official office or paying out of pocket. I am not sure how many people will want to do that. Giving employees more choice could save lots of money. But only if managers are prepared to lose some control.
I hope this is going to take off. I'd happily take a stroll across a park to a shared workspace, then go back home, rather than spend 3 hours commuting.
The problem (not for me, but potentially for my employer) is that I will not be sitting with my coworkers, so building this sense of "community" is going to be much harder for them. The solution? Force everyone back in to the office as soon as possible...
an anecdotal example: a relative of mine is an electrical engineer, and has worked on satellite on-board software for the last 34 years or so.
she used to loathe working from home during the lockdown, but when the restrictions were eased she started enjoying it a lot.
if anything, she says, she's getting at least one hour and a half more sleep in the morning and she's skipping the commute on the way back, so that's another hour saved.
she still has to go in the office on friday, but according to her that's more of a management wish that anything really useful.
I'm wondering to what extent social working has to be within a company.
A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?
If you work at a bank that's basically impossible. Most people will deal with data to some degree, anyone else in the room needs to be cleared for that data (i.e. employee of the same company).
And banks aren't the only companies where that applies, anyone dealing with customer data cannot just use a shared office with people of other companies. If you deal with code that can also apply to some degree.
I've often enough seen confidential data on trains/planes because people were working on the go and not using proper screen protectors (in the past those were mostly consultants). Luckily that never included sensitive customer data. The more people work in public places, the higher the risk for data breaches.
I love working from home but I think it has to be either home or office for many, cafes or co-working spaces aren't a viable solution and a nightmare for anyone in IT security.
It sounds like you are describing co-working spaces that have already existed for a few years. Some are subscription, others are drop in (e.g. if you work from home but want to book a nice room for a meeting). I assume each has their own culture depending on their clientele.
I'm in a similar solution - 1br, 1 living room, 1 kitchen, 2 people - so while everyone's been showing off their fortress of solitude, I've spent 12 months at the kitchen table. Watching people on youtube build stylish and spacious home offices has become our new fantasy porn.
I've heard a lot of people saying that companies are going to realise this means they can cut down on their property costs, but far, far fewer mentioning that they're moving the costs for us. We're looking for somewhere with 2-3br so we can dedicate WFH space, and it's going to mean 2-3x our current rent.
I think permanent WFH means tons of savings for employers, and meager tax savings for employees. Our costs have gone up substantially in one year of working from home, and the government doesn't allow us to write almost anything off.
Whereas an office could write off coffee, TP, cleaning staff, electricity, the whole rent etc, we are stuck with only being able to write off equipment we bought specifically for working and wondering if the tax authorities will come after us for that.
It's kind of a ratchet, possibly still underappreciated. If WFH was to become the norm, the rational thing for a person in your situation to do would be to find that 2-3br place in a location where it costs 1-1.5x your current rent. There's no point in living in cramped, overpriced apartment in the city, that was bought on the assumption that everyone living in it will be out at work/school for most of the day, when there's no work to go to! And once enough skilled workers move away, it might be tougher for the companies to bring them all back, reinforcing the pressure for WFH.
I am fortunate enough to be able to afford a 2br (65-70m^2 internal) to myself, so I have more than enough room and don't feel cramped. As such, I tend to go the opposite direction - 4 days at home, 1 day in the office out of obligation. Sometimes I just skip that 1 day a week if my workload requires more focus time, as office time is generally me helping more junour staff. I agree though that a mixed mode can be a best of both worlds scenario.
If we as a whole continue down the path of more WFH, open shared office spaces may eventually begin to find their feet and fill that 'mixed-mode' equivalent if the company itself does not have office space. I predict there might also be more public spaces such as libraries opening up with work areas for people to get out of home when working.
The other challenge is the social component of work, but I think that will change post-Covid too. Being in Australia has afforded me the extremely lucky capability of being able to get out and socialise almost completely freely during the last year, and it undoubtly helps immensely. I think that for people who live alone, working from home will become less isolating when they can socalise outside of work hours more freely again. For example, social sport is a lot easier to fit in to your day when you're not then also losing an hour or more in your day to travel. You can do it and still easily have time to prep dinner or do your daily chores.
In short, I think that the shift to WFH due to covid will be a lot easier for a lot more people once the restrictions of Covid subside.
There's a whole new world of opportunities for co-working, mixed-working out there and they'll explode after this pandemic is over.
I had to cancel my co-work subscription when no client would accept my proposal to work remote. When the world reopens I'll never go back.
In your case, imagine yourself pleasantly walking to your local co-working space or to any of the urban entertainment facilities that will inevitably proliferate in the effort to capture all the time freed from lousy daily commutes.
If I were you I'd take that as a sign that you shouldn't double down on work to give you a social life. If I were you I'd take this as a hint to put strict boundaries between work and personal life and try and have more of the latter.
It's more likely that we'll end up in a hybrid environment. Previous companies I've worked for already had clean-desk policies. No-one, not even the CEO had a fixed desk.
Teams were assigned areas so they knew where in the building to meet, but if you arrived late and all the desks were taken you simply went and found another area (or if you needed to hide to minimize disruptions).
In a hybrid-model this becomes even easier, because the hardest thing with the above model is keeping free capacity in a growing company.
It will probably end with a better balance than right now. I used to enjoy working from home a couple days a week as focus days with minimal interruptions, but doing this all week with a lot happening inside the house at the same time (schools and daycare closed, spouse also wfh every day, grandparents in the house taking care of the kids, 3 different package delivery services at the door etc.) is not that great and I can't wait to work from the office again.
Obviously there are also numerous negative effects. That‘s why I qualified my statement like this.
To respond to the point you made: I am a young single guy loving on his own. Still, I do not mind the lockdown so much. Granted, I may not be very representative, but just another data point.
There is too much investment into office real estate for it to vanish. I think once things are back to "normal", you'll easily be able to find a normal office job. I would expect the majority of people are more in your camp than the 100% remote camp.
I don't think WFH during a pandemic is a good point of comparison to regular WFH. It'd be like me judging it by my current situation where we just upgraded our lockdown again very severely. I've got a 7 year old and a 4 year old playing Twister next to my desk right now at 0842! All the things I like doing during the day are closed or extremely restricted. I know this is going to suck! Some of my friends have been stuck at home trying to keep kids on remote learning going whilst working in open plan houses for over a year. This is just not a normal situation.
i'm optimistic here; you're not the only one and society will adapt to this new void if WFH persists. we are after all social and want to spend time with other people.
covid is still very much among us so don't expect much socializing until people feel safe to leave their basements.
Work isn't the only place you can socialise with people. You seem to have a deeper problem if you're using work to fill that void. Do you need help on finding alternative sources?
On a weekday pre covid many people would spend about half their waking hours at work so its reasonable for work to be a major social component in their lives. I'd guess that other social activities they might have been doing were also curtailed due to covid. As another single person I can definitely relate to feeling very isolated over the past year.
That's unduly personal and crosses into IPD (Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis). Please don't do that here–the odds that it will land well with the other person are vastly smaller than you expect, no matter how helpful your intentions are.
> Just like every other human being you can socialise with the people around you (unless you live in the middle of the desert with nobody around, in which case I apologise)
Or, you know, if we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
Where should he socialize? Everything's closed and some have even curfews and rules against socializing anyone outside their household? What options does it leave to a lonely guy like op? Pretty much none.
It might really be a liberating moment for people (and economies, but let's care about people first). I don't know the future but I've seen way too much absurd friction in too many workplaces not to believe this can be a good step.
