Tech

Working remotely changed everything. And it just keeps getting weirder


Woman working on laptop.

Morsa Image / Getty Images

It’s tempting to think that, two and a half years after telework is forced on many office workers, people will understand it.

And even now, I think, many workers and their managers are still struggling to understand exactly what this shift in our working lives really means.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the idea of ​​people working at the office all day every day is no longer the automatic assumption it used to be. According to one study, almost half of all office workers are now working entirely remotely or in some kind of hybrid work arrangement. And they seem to like it (and as a result sleep more).

Managers find themselves in the somewhat odd position of having to convince their employees to return to the office. Even weirder, bosses are finding themselves asking people to come back to the office even if it makes them less than productivity.

Workers do not want to stay at home because they cannot go to work.

They want to stay home because many of them are more productive that way.

If you’re working on a project that requires focus and focus, an office full of people talking about what they watched on TV last night is pretty much the last place you want to be.

Of course, the smartest bosses – and workers – are willing to trade a bit of short-term productivity for the chance to bring their teams together at least once to discuss strategy, coming up with new ideas, or simply to be a reminder of what it’s like to be a team with a common goal.

In a way, it’s completely understandable why bosses would want people back in the office – that way they can at least see what people are up to (and make sure they inactive for a second or a third job during their 9 to 5).

What the shift to remote work has actually done shows the many quirks and stresses that have slowly built up within the average workday over a number of years. Over the past decade or so, the established standards office has made less and less sense because it is underpinned by an assumption that is no longer true (that the people, data, and tools they use must be collected). collected in a physical space).

‘Quiet quitting’ and ‘silent firing’ have always been issues, but they become more and more apparent as we begin to challenge everything else about office life. Similarly, concepts such as ‘overemployment’ are actually the result of the rise of telework, outsourcing and cloud computing, and it is not likely to be the last phenomenon either. together in the workplace using technology.

It is easy to see that there will be a rapid evolution of working methods in the next year or two – an explosion of the Cambrian way of working means that the working day in the near future will be absolutely different.

Already clear on the horizon is the concept of 4 days of the week claiming that it can make us more productive and give us another day off each week.

Throw in the appearance of the metaverse, and that means the ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of our work all change.

Your work week is about to get weirder.

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