Based on common sense - how many people want to waste 1 or 2 hours each day on commute when they could spend it better in so many ways? Or maybe I'm out of touch and people don't value their free time as much as I thought..
I'm sure there is a complex Venn diagram to be had here. Anyone making blanket statements about wants/efficiency/etc is a fool.
I have an hour commute each way if I want to go in and a dedicated 12x12 office bathed in natural light. There's no possible way a company office could come close to the productivity and comfort I have here, even on video calls.
Another chunk of the population lives in apartments not much bigger than my personal office and have a 10 minute walking commute into an office. If I were in that situation I'd maybe enjoy going into an office to do work more (but I probably would never choose to put myself into that specific living scenario).
There is likely everything in between those extremes. You also need to question intro/extro personalities, how much and what type of collaboration is part of the job, etc.
We used to live in a world where there was only one option: come into the office where the paper work lived. Now we have a choice. Let's take maximum advantage of that.
Again, this is the thought of people with nice detached houses in the suburbs. Commuting doesn't have to be the horrible pain some people make it out to be. When working for Amazon, I always lived within a 30 minute walk of the office. The walk through Seattle was always beautiful and I looked forward to it each day. I would get a coffee at the same cafe and had relationships with people there. Some days I would leave early and sit in the park for a while. On the way back home I would stop and get dinner or grocieries, often with friends.
WFH reality means that the most pleasant part of my day is destroyed. It takes all the joy of living in the city away.
> WFH reality means that the most pleasant part of my day is destroyed. It takes all the joy of living in the city away.
Then don't wfh if your company gives you the option to do one or the other.
Companies that today mandate one mode or the other (or some odd combination) are losing the potential value the ill-affected team can bring to the table.
WFH for those who'd like to, WFO for those who don't.
People working from the office saying "well I can't be as effective if so few people are coming into the office" are basically saying that their productivity needs outweigh the productivity needs of others.
I don't understand why you can't go for a walk while WFH. You're still the same distance from the cafe. If anything, with less constraint on your route, it leaves you more time to walk to more varied and nicer places
Because then you go back home, which is really your work.
The WFH pushers like to set up a “why spend 1-2 hours on commute when you could use that time on other things” straw-man. Some of us enjoyed our 20-30 minute commute as a separation between work and the rest of our lives.
It is not nice to come home from that coffee shop and see your workplace, waiting for you, across the room when you walk in your front door.
> It is not nice to come home from that coffee shop and see your workplace, waiting for you, across the room when you walk in your front door.
Dunno, I just close my work laptop when I'm done working and ignore it for the rest of my day just fine. I understand that non-insignificant amount of people have some weird psychological issue with that, but I don't agree that we should force everyone back to the office because of that.
For me, if I'm working from home I tend to start my work day about the time I'd leave to commute. And there is no hard stop for the day. For my commute, I have a pleasant to drive car (nothing fancy, just a hybrid Fusion), with a commute that is about 50 minutes with small parts of it in traffic (without traffic the commute would be 35 minutes). So I do have a bet of zen time when driving to work or back home, and it is useful to see and be seen. However at the same time I have invested quite a bit in my home office setup (mostly time not really mone6), more than what they provide me at work. At the office I really miss my home 32 inch 4k monitor. Also I miss the coffee I have at home.
