Please: not another online meeting!
With the largest experiment in remote work in history temporarily interrupted, at least in the northern hemisphere, by the summer vacation, many people are already pondering what the return to work will mean.
Anybody who works in a company should understand that the first stage of teleworking, which we were forced into as a result of the pandemic, has ended. At the same time, employers should not see this as a carte blanche to ask people to return to their offices. In fact, everything suggest that we will never return to the previous normal. For the time being, employers should keep one thought in mind: asking workers to return to their regular jobs would be, in the vast majority of cases, irresponsible.
On the other hand, employers should start considering another, much more interesting idea: the result of the weeks of distributed work during that first phase of the pandemic has been, in the vast majority of companies, increased productivity. Microsoft is a particularly striking example: its employees worked an average of four hours extra per week.
The result of this kind of productive fever has much to do with the intensity of the moment and the poor choice of work methodologies. Driven by uncertainty and concern for results or the survival of their companies, many people decided to work longer hours, and tried, above all, to…
