Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
My wife is a high school teacher. We returned to her classroom one evening after dinner this week so I could help her put together some shelves. After 30 minutes of assembly, I realized I needed to use the bathroom. She gave me her keys and pointed me towards the staff bathrooms. Whilst sitting on the porcelain throne, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I did a #2 in a public bathroom. I’ve been WFH since March of 2020 when COVID started, and while I’m sure I’ve crapped in a public restroom in the past 3+ years, it’s so infrequent that I can’t remember.
That’s not really the point though, more that I’ve actually been thinking about it all week and reflecting on what working in an office used to be like - crapping next to your coworkers, packing a lunch, trying to look busy when you just aren’t feeling it that day, the small talk, and everything else that result in me being absolutely drained by the time I got home. Seriously, sometimes I would just sit on the couch and stare at the wall for 30 minutes when I got home.
It took the greatest global event of the 21st century to shift us to WFH. We can’t let companies force us into backsliding into these out-dated work practices when all common sense says otherwise.
I say this as a rare person who prefers to work in office.
Good.
Seriously, would much rather work with productive happy people. the remote work phenomenon has proven that between reduced traffic, the commercial real estate bubble, the fact that we’re literally all connected to each other 24/7 through the series of tubes means it’s about time we restructure the workforce.
This is the thing. Remote work as an option helps everyone. Lower costs for the employer, happier employees, the people who do want to work in an office have a better time because it’s less crowded, the people who need to care for kids or parents have an easier time…it’s entirely a win for everyone.
Except real estate companies, and therein lies the problem.
It’s even good for the environment! The amount of time, money, and energy (and that energy needs to be generated somehow) used to support everyone’s daily commute is IMMENSE. More than a few cities noted significantly improved air quality when the quarantines were in effect in 2020, and there’s still a noticeable difference in a lot of places.
Among the primary benefits: no commute, flexible work schedules and less time getting ready for work, according to WFH Research.
They forgot: being able to secretly simultaneously work 3 full-time overlapping jobs to triple your income.
I had a coworker who did exactly this back in the '90s. He was an expert in a really obscure programming/database platform/language from the 1970s (called “Cyborg”) that only had a few people left that knew anything about it. It took literally hours to compile even the tiniest code changes so his job mostly involved sitting around doing nothing waiting for the compiler to finish. He managed to eventually get a WFH situation (with dialup lol) that paid him $300 an hour, then went out and got two other similar WFH jobs that paid the same since his actual work load was just a few minutes per day for each. $900 an hour in the 1990s.
I know you guys are going to hate this, but I’m seeing a trend develop that no one is talking about. Work in our office is being divided up differently, jobs are morphing. There’s the work that can be done from home, and the work that can’t. Guess which one the bosses are talking about farming out to third world countries.
In my opinion hybrid is the way. Go in three days a week, do the things that require a physical presence, don’t worry about your job getting off shored.
My guy did you already forget all the manufacturing jobs that got off shored over the past few decades?
