Five months ago, we all had to get used to working from home — our lives were turned upside-down, but most of us adapted, even if it was grudgingly. We got used to working from our kitchens, we tolerated yet another Zoom meeting and we enjoyed our own version of lockdown fashion.
Some of us have managed, some have thrived, but others have realised it’s time to get back to normal and return to the office.
David Seinker, founder and CEO of The Business Exchange (TBE), says: “The honeymoon is officially over — not that it felt like much of a honeymoon to start with. Many companies and employees are more than eager to get back to the office.”
Here are his findings:
- People are craving proper, in-person connection. “Colleagues used to be able to chat over their coffee break, network in-person and bounce ideas off one another [before the lockdown]. It’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s not possible to replicate these experiences over Zoom or Google Hangouts.”
- Security is not what it used to be. When you work from an office, your work is safe and is protected by your company’s firewalls and other high-level systems. At home, this is not the case. “In an office environment, not only is your work secure, but the chances are that your IT team has taken extra steps to ensure your network is also extra secure. At home, you’re living on your own local network and you probably haven’t accounted for how easy it could be for someone to hack into your connection.”
- Working in the same space as your partner, where your children are doing their online schooling every other day (or more often), is not just difficult, it’s juggling on steroids. “Offices provide parents with a break in their daily home routines and focus solely on one task — their work. Right now, many are working into the night because during the day it’s homeschool, taking care of the kids and running errands.”
- There are parents stressed as they try to multi-task their way through the lockdown, and there are those who live alone and feel isolated as the office provides an important source of human contact. “Now, many are longing to return to a place where there is daily interaction with others. It’s really been a roller-coaster.”
- There are so many ways to communicate that no-one is communicating at all. There’s e-mail, WhatsApp, Zoom, Slack, and many more, but the deluge of messages from different platforms often ends up with everyone just feeling overwhelmed.
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