Hesitating Going Back to the Office?

We missed the office banter, our escape from home. But are we going to miss working from home?

After being stuck at home for months on months, we were feeling bored. We wanted to see our colleagues, sit in our comfy office desk and have a laugh with our work wives/husbands. Now that working from home is part of our lives, the office life has become a distant memory…

Depending where you are in the world, offices are slowly starting to open up and people are drifting back to meeting up with their colleagues.

Do employees want to go back into the office full time again? Whilst being home 24/7 is a lot a times, you do become use to it and you get that extra time with your family. You don’t need to make pack lunches early in the morning or late at night. You don’t need to rush into work after being stuck in traffic and you may be saving money not commuting to work. You can make a decent cup of coffee at home and have some great food.

On the flip slide, your work life and home life has merged into one. You might be working longer hours as you don’t have a commute. It can be hard to manage your work life balance. You might not be exercising as much as you haven’t left the house since the weekend. Your social interaction skills have been more on the awkward side. Does anyone know how do you greet people now?

Whilst there is a lot of pros and cons working from home and going back into the office. What is the future of work, what do people want? That’s what you need to be asking your employees directly. There may be some hesitation going back into the office. The comments you may get asked are: if the office safe enough, what if I don’t want to go in, I feel anxious meeting people, what are you going to do about it? We need to work together to make employees comfortable so they feel happy going back into the office after.

We have missed the office and maybe we will miss working from home too. Businesses have proved they can work from home, so there’s no excuse. People enjoy working both ways, so perhaps the future of work is a hybrid approach. The future of work seems flexible and we enjoy that, maybe that’s the way we are going?

What do you think?

Photo by Diana Schröder-Bode on Unsplash