Bleeding Edge

During the pandemic’s most difficult season, a new work culture developed:

Remote work.

Now this year long “Remote Work” has grown to be an old and tired experience, as a growing number of employees have been pining for their office space and the office camaraderie…

That transition to office was taking place at a time when companies are now going back to delaying the office workers’ returns to their office due to the new variants of COVID.

Yet, apparently — absence makes the heart grow fonder, but the return to the office is not solely for work reasons.

A new worker’s confidence survey found that 31% of office workers would prefer to work from home full time, while 45% wanted to be in a workplace or an office full time. The remaining 24% wanted to split time between work and home. All of this creates an interest dilemma for employers because while most workers have embraced remote and hybrid, a sizeable chunk are craving that in-office experience.

But when you dig deeper, the reasons for wanting to return to the office provide some telling insights for both employees and employers alike. Many office workers miss the in-person interactions, socializing and having in-vivo intercourse with their colleagues within the office culture.

They explain this as an essential element of work culture because, they want to re-establish a collegiate atmosphere as well as a buffer between work and personal life — something that’s led to an explosion of “burnout” due to increased work-life imbalance.

Humans are social animals, and for most, in-person interactions [even in small doses] can have a tremendous impact on well being.

While returning to the office full time before September ends, may not yet be in the cards — yet one possibility is to hold smaller periodic meetups based on the geography of the business at the front of the office building, at the parking lot, or even at the local park, or a central co-working location, so that the people can get together and start re-imagining the “next day” of this cultural shift.

Mind you that today, this simple effort, would improve morale, get the people to shine, reduce long commutes, and make our people happy — while we shall still be embracing the social distancing and remote work arrangements demanded by few scared souls, and their burned-out feelings that were generated by the abundant fear that was spread wholesale by the hysterical Media during this epidemic of paranoia.

And indeed there are those that really enjoy the isolation that befell society due to this epidemic, and their fears have led to the abundant caution seen in effect all around us. Of course by meeting someplace in-vivo, you’d also help generate your New Culture while appeasing those hardy souls who really miss the office work culture experience herewith.

Because in terms of work-life balance, the commute to and from the office often provided a needed gap for all of us to disengage from work or home as the case might be, and since remote work took away that buffer and drove all of us into a terrible isolation — this has had a very negative consequence for both the mental and the physical health of all working people out there… and especially for the children of all of us, that were surely affected negatively by the psychological changes wrought in all of us and by their own isolation troubles as well…

Time to remedy all of that now.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

Today, here is a new approach to consider, because it is simple in concept, yet difficult to execute.

The approach is easy enough: reevaluate the benefits and support services you provide to workers and offer an array of programs in wellness and mental health. But, here’s the hard part: empathy. Not to be flippant, but understanding what your workers are experiencing based on their needs is hard, and frankly, lacking. But by offering support that matters them (e.g. fitness, childcare, wellness), well, even a small amount of empathy can go a long way.

In a world of in-office, remote and hybrid workers, the cookie-cutter approach simply doesn’t work.

Preserving our old work culture is old school thinking and largely impractical now, because we need to be focusing on how to evolve forward before we regress to the state of incivility demonstrated by some who really enjoy the “mask-up” mandates as seen on the photograph bellow…