Working from home is comfortable. Comfort is not the goal.
“Without pain you don’t become happy. /Without love you suffer no more.” “El Duelo” by La Ley.
“Sin dolor no te hacés feliz. /Sin amor no sufres más.” “El Duelo”, La Ley.
They said the internet would eat the real world, but instead, the pandemic did. For almost three years, even I, a girl of the streets, became a recluse. We are using our homes and our public spaces differently. We barely use our office space at all. We shop online and we seldom visit stores, unless it’s for an order pick up. We work from home. And working from home is, above all, comfortable. We get to regulate our environment: we choose the temperature of the room, the softness of our pants, the brightness of the light. We nap when we need to, and the commute is ideal: we are always a moment away from work.
In the “work from home” vs. “back to the office” fight, the bias of the person giving their opinion is tantamount to the result. When studies are based on employer surveys, the results say productivity is down. When they are based on employee surveys, they say productivity is up. There´s one caveat: usually, when we talk about productivity we talk about completed tasks and delivered deliverables. We talk about how deep we’ve dug. Measuring whether we are digging the right hole is harder. Drucker said that “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” We all know that doing the right things right is the way to got, and for that, hybrid work might be best.
Remote work, while offering many advantages, can also hurt employees and teams. Communication, mental health, and creativity often suffer. Working from home is correlated with a higher likelihood of anxiety and depression — up to 35% more. The pandemic moved many employers to offer mental health support, and sustaining that is necessary. Some office time might help, too. The change of environment and the interaction with others IRL provide a boost for mood and mental health.
Communication can also be challenging in remote work situations. Setting boundaries and feeling connected to the team can be difficult for individual contributors. Setting a culture and feeling like people are being productive can be difficult for managers.
Creativity and spontaneity can also suffer in the WFH scenario. People huddling around a whiteboard, seeing each other in the hallway on the way to lunch, having random discussions over coffee — these are chance encounters that produce the type of quirky ideas that can make a company more effective. Serendipity and cross pollination are old concepts in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs famously believed in both: “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat — that’s crazy,” Jobs is quoted as having said. “Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
Going back to the office is uncomfortable, disruptive, and a little taxing. So is going to the gym, or learning something new. Comfort is not the goal. Being happier could be. Challenges are hard, but they are also exciting, inspiring, energizing. Working from home makes us more efficient and working at the office makes us more effective. Since fully remote work is making us sad anyways, let’s give going back to the office a few days a week a chance.
