Why must we go back to the office?
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Work From Home, Work, Coronavirus, Traffic, Pandemic

IMAGE: Alexander Grishin — Pixabay (CC0)

The early availability of vaccines suggests there is light at the end of the long pandemic tunnel, but we must keep up our guard and avoid infection: we’ve got this far, after all; what’s more, the so-called return to normal mustn’t mean returning to how we did things before all this began.

Think back to a year ago, when there were already too many things we were doing badly, and which were the cause of many of the problems we still face. To make matters worse, there is the undelayable and enormous problem called the climate emergency, which is going to require making many changes to our way of living.

Have you returned to your office yet? With the exception of the few jobs that simply cannot be performed remotely, a lot of people who were working from home during the toughest phases of the pandemic have already returned to their workplaces. As shown by the rush hour traffic statistics in many cities, most people have already returned to their pre-pandemic routine of getting into a car in the morning, sitting in traffic jams, and then in a chair in an office where they “work” a certain number of hours. With the notable exception of some technology companies and other organizations with reasonable attitudes going back to work seems to have become an obsession.

Why this need to return to presentialism, if it has been demonstrated that the months of lockdown saw no drop in productivity, with many people saying they put more hours in? Are there really so many managers out there who are incapable of realizing the possibilities offered by giving their workers more freedom to work from wherever they want?

The sad truth is that we seem locked in a vicious circle: many workers, faced with the expectation that working from home will be a short-term situation, have given up on investing in adapting their homes, their internet connection or their equipment, even though their companies are in many cases willing to assume part of that cost. Why? Because the attitude of their companies has led them to think that as soon as possible, even if it is not yet totally safe, they will be forced to return to the office or they will harm their career prospects. In practice, this vicious circle is a consequence of the short-term thinking of many managers, who, whatever happens, want to keep their subordinates under control, to see them, to watch them closely, to micromanage them, as if today’s companies were simply a continuation of the workshops of the industrial revolution.

This is the intellectual chicanery that prevents many companies and professionals from accessing obvious benefits that could result in more productive relationships while reducing emissions by avoiding unnecessary trips and traffic jams at rush hour. It is this isomorphism, this tendency to continue doing things the way we’ve always done them, that prevents us from evolving as a society, from unlearning and doing things the way they really should be done.

The challenge we face is to free ourselves from habits that force many of us to work in ways that make no sense, as if we were chained to a chair for a number of hours so as to carry out tasks we could do from anywhere, more comfortably and much more flexibly. The consequences of this refusal to see the obvious are enormous: from the need to live in a certain place, to wasting valuable hours stuck in traffic every day, to a bunch of unnecessary routines.

Among the very few positive things that this pandemic has produced is the opportunity to work in new ways, to create new working relationships, to do things differently. Giving up that possibility of learning and striving to go back to work as before is the definition of intellectual poverty. It is a failure as a manager, which time will show. But it is also, without a doubt, a failure as a society.