Keep in mind that your COVID WFH experience is not the normal WFH. Normally you would have the opportunity to gain all your commute time and ge to experience a real social life that is not bound to your office.

Living in one of the most congested areas in the world, with a public transit system that has been deliberately neglected by successive governments since the 1970's thanks to the car and concrete lobby, a 1 hour commute is very much an underestimate for most office workers here.

I notice especially the younger single colleges never had the time to build a real social life post university, because they spend all their time outside work commuting. So they have substituted this with an in office social life. WFH for them now means sitting alone in an apartment, missing their office social circle, and having more time but nothing to fill it with as all the bars and restaurants, the cafes and the theaters are closed, as is the gym, art school, language courses, those have moved online as well.

This is not normal. Normal WFH is gaining not just 2 hours that were lost in commute, but also gaining massive productivity due to not having the stress that comes with 2 hours of bumper to bumper stop and go traffic each day. Those 2 hours open up enormous social possibilities. Things you can do each evening that you normally only get to enjoy in the weekends.

I do hope the 'new normal' stays, and people will get to experience the 'real' WFH as well.

The 8 hours alone is already too much for me, even if I had all the normal stuff open. I actually had close to the ideal remote existence, complete with month long vacations and all that, and had come back to the office pre-COVID because it just was not healthy for me to spend so much of the average week alone.

I think the other part of the dynamic is that with no one around employees become inboxes that you can dump infinite work into. Some of the finer grained feedback like the grimace when an overworked person is assigned yet another task is lost.

My hope for the future is we rediscover the value of human contact, just any human contact, but that feels unlikely.

I've been working remotely for the last 8 years. I completely agree with you about 8 hours alone being too much. I very rarely tolerate that, even during covid, but that doesn't mean I want to be required to go to my company's office. The alternatives are to work from a co-working space of your choice, a coffee shop, a friend's house, or a park (if you have mobile internet). There are many advantages to these choices: no excessive commute, the ability to spend your days around people you like rather than people who just happen to be your coworkers, the ability to have some variety in your environment, the flexibility to work from wherever is convenient on any given day, being judged by your output rather than how long your ass is in a chair, it's easier to schedule exercise or naps during the day, etc.

During normal times I have a co-working group chat made up of people who have similar interests to me and we meet at different co-working spaces or coffee shops every day to work. The pandemic has made this risky, so now I do work from home for half a day usually and then charge up my laptop and either meet some people at an outdoor coffee shop or grab my bike and go sit under a tree at my favorite park with my hotspot.

Granted, working from home can be isolating without intention, and the pandemic makes it harder, it doesn't have to be that way.

You realize that not everybody is so desperate to have work that requires commute taking 2+ hours of life, every single effin day. Its mostly issue with huge cities or folks desperately wanting to buy a home with garden regardless of realities of their current location, like it would magically solve whatever issue they face in their lives.

WFH now might not be representative of WFH of yesterday's days, but its what many folks face now, and its not going anywhere soon.

Productivity increase - I can't imagine this happening in any big, multinational corp, only smaller, more agile companies or if you work on your own. Its simply not the way things are done. Way more conf calls, amount of emails is roughly 3x higher so finding even a stupid email conversation I still recall from few weeks ago becomes a challenge. Expectations from business are the same.

You need serious discipline, no distractions (if you are not constantly pulled into some decisions/calls then you are probably not important in that company or a fresh hire).

For me, covid was a blessing, I could spend home with my newborn son and wife and overall I am clearly one of the winners in very small pool of folks who can claim similar situation. For now while I still have work. But I am clearly an outlier, for most its has been pretty bad situation in many aspects.

Companies will save on rent, and probably lower salaries long term but I can't see employees as winners overall in long term. Apart from few very loud folks, who either had stupid long commute because of their not-so-bright prior decisions, or some other outliers.

>You realize that not everybody is so desperate to have work that requires commute taking 2+ hours of life

I've always regarded it as pretty much a requirement that my commute be 10-15 minutes, max. I was even able to maintain that a scant few miles from the center of DC, by working in a suburb in the opposite direction from all the other commuters. My other jobs have also been in cities; once I lived in an apartment a 10 minute walk from the middle of Richmond. Part of that is that I've been happy to live either downtown or right off a highway and not somewhere more isolated.

However, I still feel like WFH saves time, because after packing up, walking to the parking lot, driving home, checking the mail, unpacking, etc. it seems like roughly an hour disappears after work every day before I'm really at leisure.

"You realize that not everybody is so desperate to have work that requires commute taking 2+ hours of life"

Please realize that a 2 hour commute in my country means living 30 km away from your workplace.

I don't miss commuting. Aside from the stress and the smell its also expensive! A public transport subscription costs thousands of euro per year.

For me I hope the "new normal" is a balance of being able to work from home without prejudice and work in the office when that makes the most sense.

By without prejudice I mean not having to beg for it or it being limited to X days a month, etc. I want to be able to update a team/department/whatever calendar every week or so with when I will be in the office and that's it. Maybe I work from home for 3 weeks then had three days in the office the week after. If that works best it shouldn't be an issue to just say that is what you're doing.

While I talk in the first person I actually already work remotely and have done a while now. However having my wife working from home since March has been amazing for us. We get to have lunch together most days which I thought we would get bored of but 6 months later we still love it. Preparing a nice lunch together then just chatting and eating together is something we very rarely get with a child.

Not to mention the time saved sitting in a car/train/bus means we can better use that time for other daily responsibilities such as household chores or sometimes just having an hour or two more personal time that isn't restricted to a seat in a vehicle. Once or twice a week my wife and I have been going out for a walk, usually together but sometimes alone just to get some time outside without any specific reason for it.

She is back in the office two days a week now and she is okay with that. She likes seeing her "office family" but as she puts "it seeing them twice a week is enough". She likes her colleagues as many are good friends and she missed them a lot when it was 100% WFH but she also finds 5 days "a bit too much with some of them".

I wouldn't say a push for 100% WFH is what most people want (some yes but not most). It is the flexibility to decide with your team what needs to be done in the office and what can be done from home and being able to just do that without any hassle.

Similar here. I miss the opportunity to have a lunch with some of my colleagues. But five times a week, after spending the entire day together, is too much. It feels like my colleagues are my family, and my real family is just an unimportant side job.

I agree, having a balance is probably what will happen after Covid goes away - hopefully.

I think it largely depends on the person. For example, as I am someone that's extremely introverted, going to work and interacting with people outside of my duties drains the hell out of me and makes me miserable by the time I get home.

The more conciseness of communicating and lack of socializing with coworkers has made me both much happier and more productive. Granted, I'm on the pretty far end of the introvert-extrovert spectrum and am much happier being by myself for extended periods of time, so I'm sure it definitely varies.

We had a single day of office time a week before covid, and I basically wrote off that day as 'social day' for similar reasons.

I'd get things that involved meetings done, but the density of social stuff that got packed into that day meant it was a struggle to get other things done, so I mostly tried to pack meetings into that day and just accepted I'd do little of anything else.

They I realised there was nothing special about those days - it was how things used to be for me when I spent the whole day in an office.

The thought of going back to an office in any future job file me with dread.

> interacting with people outside of my duties drains the hell out of me

Do you find the interaction universally draining or a matter of consent? I usually detest the interruptions save a few colleagues which I find fun to talk to.

I find pretty much any social interaction draining. It's been a source for my chronic, major depression. While I don't have any issues socializing, like talking to people, keeping a conversation, or making friends, I just really don't like doing any of those things and I would be most happy never doing those things again, if it was viable and acceptable.

I’m not necessarily introverted but I detest small talk, I don’t talk about “unsafe” subjects, I don’t complain about anything at the company, I don’t talk about anything going on at home good or bad, what’s left to talk about with coworkers?

I’m always careful to keep a strict professional line with management, it gets to be tiring to always be “on”. My professional self is nothing like how I am in my personal life.

Interaction? Heh. The presence of other people is already draining. Trying to work surrounded by people in open space feels like trying to work when loud music is playing. Yes, it is possible, but I wish so much I could have an office -- or just a cubicle -- for myself alone!

The happiest moments are when I get into flow and stop noticing the world around me. And that's usually when the interruptions happen.

Talking with the few colleagues I like is fun. But at the end of the day, the work needs to get done, and the working conditions are not helpful.

That’s a good point, presence is enough to cause me stress, since it means interruption can happen at any moment. I find it’s hard to motivate working on anything that might take more than 15 minutes. I guess that represents the average time to interruption or amount of time I can ask anyone to wait for me to finish what I’m doing.

It’s a shame since the most interesting stuff gets done when no one else is around, specifically at home after family’s gone to bed, but that could be each work day.

For me, being present but not available with my family is some kind of hell, like the end of Interstellar looking at your family after you've gone - ever present but out of reach. But I've been suffering from the emotional fallout of going back to work full-time after having a family already - this just rubs it in extra deep.

You say you're more productive but are you producing the right things?

It's easy to note when you suddenly get more uninterrupted time for work, and also to note how that translates into e.g. more code produced.

But does it improve the bottom line in the longer run? I.e. is it good for business? I think the jury may still be out on this one.

Working remotely means less efficient communication with coworkers, and that might in the longer run result in people getting less efficient because they can't synch very well, so end up working on the wrong things, or prioritising badly. Then it's also the psychological effect of missing out on social interaction that may reduce happiness and, in the end, efficiency/productivity.

It's an interesting experiment for sure. Covid may be to remote working what Tesla is to the electrification of personal transport.

> You say you're more productive but are you producing the right things?

This is often a problem even when people are spending the day in the office. It is not obvious that working from home makes this problem worse.

Sometimes you get an information on Monday, a contradictory one on Tuesday, and a completely different "final" version on Wednesday. Suppose you missed the version from Tuesday because you were not in the office. How much harm actually happened?

Generally, when a resource is abundant, it becomes cheaper to abuse it. In the age of corporate-agile, managers often don't even bother to think their decisions to the end, because hey, we can still change the plan tomorrow. Nobody bothers to write meeting minutes, because there is another meeting soon anyway. Not sure if it's just my bubble, but even having a flipchart with notes is becoming a rarity.

I would enjoy the return of the culture where we thought whether we are producing the right thing before I already had half of the code written.

Not me.. I’m exactly the opposite. Happy to WFH forever, and I’m in senior management at a financial services company.

Seems we each have to make our stands with every article on this. But I’m not sure any of them are saying anything different within the body of this reporting. Go back to the office if you want, but I hope businesses can adjust to a mix of office arrangements, and WFH arrangements.

I love working from home but sometimes I miss my colleagues. I think ideal for me would be to be at the office once very one or two weeks. If I have to choose between being at the office 4-5 days a week vs never, I'll choose never just to keep my sanity.

> I miss feeling like a part of something larger than myself

hoping your job is fill that hole for you is begging to be abused. this is how tesla and other major "be a part of something bigger!" marketing allows for them to pay little

You can have it both ways.

I wrote about this when I worked full-time remote a few years back [1]. It's a very different scenario when you think of it as working anywhere instead of working from home. I think post-COVID we're going to see a huge boom in coworking spaces with much better facilities, and that will provide the missing social elements of the office.

[1] https://west.io/blog/working-remotely-vs-working-alone/

You can have it all remotely too. Intentional communities are being formed now across the globe with the idea of getting amazing people together in the nature to maximize both their joy AND productivity. This is the best of two worlds really. Check the one we started in Somoma: @siliconforestblog on IG (dm if interested).

Upd: on intraversion, somebody said nicely that we just love being at piece and because of that we just need people who bring us piece. It’s really about who you surround yourself with, not extra/intraversion, IMO