Is 2022 the year we stop living at the office?

In 2020 I wrote an article saying that working from home (WFH) had silently morphed into living at the office; it certainly had for me. The response I had to the piece was quite remarkable; I was not alone and the transition had happened to a large number of people in many countries across a wide range of industry and commerce sectors. The number of hours they were doing had slowly and inexorably crept up. Some people were experiencing guilt, even at weekends, if they were not at their desk. Those that managed to contain their hours were working more efficiently and, free of interruptions, were more productive.

Productivity statistics and other recently published articles suggest that, briefly, productivity did not fall, quite the reverse in fact, and that, in the UK, approximately 250,000 people realised precisely how dull their jobs were and voluntarily left their employers for lower paid but more fulfilling work.

The myth, perpetuated by managers and business owners with wholly outmoded perspectives, that home workers do nothing but tend the garden, decorate and watch TV was completely exploded; it simply is not the case.

OK, so what? I hear you say. Well, I thought I'd briefly share my view of the So what?

The post Covid working style is seeing a paradigm shift. In a very tight UK employment market, companies need to ensure that jobs are interesting and meaningful and that the employee is made to feel valued. Much more effort has to be put into the design of a job function. So, that's goodbye to mechanistic job functions and hello to collaboration and meaningful departmental interworking. Hierarchies are looking flaky and flatter structures will and should prevail.

Inter company meetings also need to quickly move on from the endless Zoom and Teams call interactions. I was able to set up a relatively complex commerce lane between Europe and the US during the lockdown but would have achieved much more had I been able to visit, shake hands and share food and drink.

Clearly, the evidence is that people like working from home. But, they also like to be with their co-workers for the cups of coffee and the water cooler moments that actually mean a lot to us. Efficiency and good Teaming is often borne out of apparent inefficiency (sipping coffee and chatting) but that's a topic for another time.

Hopefully presenteeism will finally be eradicated; less focus on how many hours are worked and more focus on whether a job is being done well. (Proof of that concept will often lie in Customer Satisfaction Surveys).

Anyway enough of my pronouncements on the post Covid working world; this is a discussion board so I'm much more interested in reader views than my own thoughts.

Did you manage to work from home or had you been living at the office? Has that now changed?