Why remote working is a short lived dream built upon empty promises ??

Multinational conglomerates and various organizations have instituted permanent remote working facilities as a part of their daily functions, there is a serious argument here that needs to be made about the loss of an office space and the proximity of your peers. More so, the replacement of working hours with an exploitative amount of time has serious long term repercussions to both the employer and the employee. As the world seemingly shifts into the era of adjusting to life in a pandemic, remote working seems to be here, but the romanticization needs to be checked and here is why.

1. The hope for technology to replace the need for human interaction has far been hypothesized, and the light in which it has been presented is exactly that, cold, constricted and concise. While technology today is better than it has ever been for there to be a shift from office spaces to virtual office spaces, it still isn’t perfect. The inequities of technology are on their glorious displays for people working from remote or backward areas. Consistent connectivity is still a distant dream for many people, whereas the world with its exquisite speed is still incoherent with the world that is being left behind. Smaller parts of developing countries struggle (if not with basic connectivity then with the consistency of it) hence creating inequities in a rather equal working space. The challenge has already been demonstrated by the numerous school-going children who, even though on an equal platform in a physical space, are highly differentiated and inturn made to feel discriminated against (not explicitly) due to the lack of that very equal space via the internet. Offices are going through a similar crisis, and the lack of equal connectivity thereafter results in a mistimed and a miscommunicated office, which indeed is the beginning of all troubles.
2. An office space is always designed in a manner where it is one of the primary duties of the Human Resources department to handle and manage stress-related issues. Through various mental health initiatives and multiple team building and office morale exercises, the human resources department in the office space are built and equipped with enough training to create bridges between any sort of distance from the employer and the employee. Remote working conditions are thereby mere assumptions of how the employee might function in a home space, surrounded by family and other day to day happenings. The assumptions leave little to no space for an actual assessment of an employee's mental health concerning his work. There is also no quantifiable team building and office morale exercises, because being in the middle of a pandemic, it is almost impossible to quantifiably know if a company’s employee is truly working in a healthy manner. The consistent loss and recuperation around a person is enough to cause them issues, but home work and a lack of accountability in terms of their hours cause further stress and even anger management related issues.
3. The other assumption that needs a re-assessment in the defence of remote working, is that home is an ideal place for work-related issues. Going back to our very first idea, the consistent separation of a person’s work and home was the only way of making a semblance of life in an era that has gone by. While there are certain occasional disruptions and distractions one has from the idea of home itself, never has there been such integration between those two heavily restricted boundaries. While people move away and away from an office into the comfort of their homes, the psychological investigation and the need for scientific literature regarding the repercussions of the same are more important now than ever before. The disruption of a safe space is harder to deal with than anyone can fathom. To do it as a lifestyle is even more conflicting, the reflection into which needs to be now more than ever before.
4. The major part of the requirement of an office space in itself is an intersection, interaction and the ideas that are born out of it. With the lack of an office space, there also has been a damper on the interaction that needs to take place to create newer ideas. The argument is not whether or not there is a creative influx in a company at a certain point during the remote working conditions, the argument is for the absence of the intersection of those ideas through multiple people and multiple devil’s advocates. There is a lack of involvement, owing to the very nature of the environment of the work and the pandemic, but what pushes it further is the lack of a spark in the office, only created via an employee and employee interaction. Inevitably in such conditions, out of the people that exist in the same superiority and pay scale, there is a chance of someone being left out of the conversation, or even though in one, feeling left out, creating rifts and differences in the office. Collaboration and comradery take a hit, and what is left is the remnants of the efforts that were once placed accurately.
5. Most of all, the office is a living and breathing space. Home sure is as well. But there is the matter of the difference of priorities between the two spaces. The machine that an office is functioning well, through each keg and axle, via the people that maintain it. The administrative staff, the managerial staff, the sales staff, the cleaning staff, the accounting staff, all exist and make the heart of an office throb. It is only through each individual's effort that most companies have accounted for their success in the past. With the lack of presence of that individual effort and just a further look at it from a distance, measuring success via numbers becomes the norm. It is indeed a troublesome idea when an enterprise only focuses on the numbers that it carries and not the people that generate those numbers. There has always been an input of the informal interactions that make an office space and generate those numbers, without which, the numbers are all but a fairytale of optimism. Companies are kept alive and well via the same informal interactions, as much as management would like to claim otherwise.

Therefore, in order to say that the office space and the sanctity of it are already dead and absent would be a folly. It is needed now more than ever. This is why the drives for remote working, vaccination and social distancing need to be crucial now. It is only after we defeat the pandemic that we truly get to go back to the office space. It is crucial that we do, considering that there is a world that is being missed out on because of it. For now, the responsible thing to do is getting vaccinated and making sure that you keep in health and favor, both mentally and physically. The era of the office is yet to return because it is the human in the human resources of a company that matters. Technology can help, but humans can hope, and that should be good enough for the sake of both the idea of work and differentiation of it from personal life.?