First, the details: This is the 6th week since my company re-opened our offices and required employees to return. All in all, they have handled it as well as they could, I think. In November, they announced that vaccines would be required and they gave very few exemptions. I think something like 97% of the staff has been vaccinated. Originally we were supposed to return to the office in early January, but it got pushed back to the week of March 7th since infection levels were high thanks to omicron. We are encouraged to go into the office 3 days/week and my boss has asked that we come in Tuesday-Thursday. I think it makes sense to target being in on certain days. Otherwise what is the point of going into the office if you don't see other people that you work with! There is much flexibility, though, and no one is monitoring when you come in. My boss treats us like adults and trusts that we are coming in around 3 days/week.
In order to go into the office, you have to go into an ap and certify that you are healthy, don't have any of the listed symptoms and have had a negative covid test in the last 7 days. Everyone coming into the office tests themselves with an antigen test or with a test that is provided by the company that supposedly provides PCR-like accuracy at home. If you watched the Superbowl, you likely saw an ad for these kinds tests - you swab your nose, put it in some solution, and then the solution goes into a warming unit for an hour. I guess the warming part is what improves the accuracy? It takes about 75 minutes to do a tests so I do my test on Sunday mornings so I know I can go to the office that following week.
So how is it going? Overall, it's gone pretty well. I think everyone I work with/interact with must be vaccinated because I have not seen people in masks (you are required to mask at all times if you receive a vaccination exemption). We were already pretty spread out before covid hit so were naturally socially distanced. Here are the pros and cons I've experienced so far!
Pros:
- I have enjoyed seeing coworkers in person. I hadn't seen most in over 2 years. I've encountered people who didn't know we had another baby! We have gotten good at communicating over teams/email, but sometimes it is nice to just walk over to someone's desk to talk about something/ask a question.
- I have loved being able to print again! We were not allowed to print ANYTHING while working from home. Usually that was not a big deal, but there are times when I really need to print something - like I find it easier to proofread when it is printed out. Things just jump out at me more on paper than when I proofread on the screen. A couple of weeks ago I had to do some complex analysis of the performance of 2 different strategies and was so glad I could print out the attribution reports and compare them side by side!
- It's been great to eat lunch out again. At first I got lunch all 3 days I was in but I only did for a couple of weeks while I adjusted to being back in the office. Now I get lunch 1 day/week and a latte 1 day/week. It's a nice treat.
Cons:
- It is so much harder to fit workouts in. When working from home, I would usually log in around 7, answer emails and address anything urgent and then I would do a quick workout. In the summer, I would run at 7 and then log on around 8 and work straight through for the rest of the day and consider my run my 'break' for the day. We have to be out the door by around 6:50 so we can be at work by around 7:30. I don't have it in me to get up at 4:45-5 to workout before going into the office, plus it seems like one or both kids is up around 5-5:15 so morning workouts just don't work right now. So instead I try to go to the gym in my building at 3 on Thursdays and I run on the treadmill. When it's nicer out, I'll do that run outdoors. That won't work during the hot months as running at 3 would be so awful so I will have to go back to the treadmill or do a strength workout or something. By doing 1 workout on the days I'm in the office, I can fit in 4 workouts/week which is probably enough.
- It's more work to get the door with hair/make-up done. Yes it feels good to be more put together, but given the choice, I'd choose more sleep over looking put together in this stage of life. ;)
- It's harder to get dinner on the table on days I go into the office. We usually get home around 5pm and ideally we eat dinner around 5:30pm. That doesn't give me much time to prepare dinner. I try to cut up things on the weekend so that dinner comes together faster but it's a more harried experience to have so little time to make dinner.
When we found out about the return to work, I jokingly told my boss that I likely wouldn't be healthy enough to go to the office about 1/3 of the time. Well, that has turned out to be right! I made it through most of the first day back in early March and then got the stomach flu and was home for the rest of tha week. Now this week, I am fighting a nasty upper respiratory virus (not covid - 3 of us have colds, we've all done antigen tests and they were all negative) so I will be home this week, too! But I'm glad there is a policy in place to stay home with you are sick so you don't spread crud around to your coworker!
All in all, I'll use Phil's favorite adjective/most common response when I ask how his day was, and characterize the return to the office as "fine." I can see the benefit of having employees together and I'm glad I can still work from home 2 days/week, but given the option, I'd probably drop my number of days in the office down to 1-2! Maybe in the future that will be an option, but for now I'll hold up my end of the bargain and try to be in 3 days/week.
Will you or have you returned to the office?
12 comments:
I don't have an office but I have been back teaching in person, and I don't think I can go back to teaching on zoom again. It's just too hard, with the seniors I teach, to really gauge how everyone is doing in class.
My husband is back in the office 3 days a week and I think his list would be similar to yours. He misses workout flexibility and the commute isn't great. But he is enjoying seeing his coworkers, and I think there were a few who had babies during the pandemic, that he didn't even know were pregnant!
I have an office, but I very rarely go in and I'm not required to. I am job hunting and looking at exclusively remote jobs because I never want to commute again!
Super interesting post!! There are definitely pros and cons. For me, my office always just felt like a hassle. It wasn't an overly long commute, all things considered, but at least 30+ minutes with traffic, and hospital parking is always super far away. So that was always irritating too, especially on cold or rainy days or dark mornings, and added extra time. I love working from home. Occasionally I wish we had the option for some kind of co-working space right here in my town, or someplace I could go that was a 5 minute drive away, just for a change of pace/ scenery now and then. Or like if we have people visiting or something and I wanted to get away to work out of the home, without going all the way to my downtown office. But nothing like that seems to exist at the moment. I haven't set foot in the hospital since February of 2020! It's so crazy. I used to go in 1x/ week, then it became 1x/ month for the whole year pre-covid. So the pandemic was really a small change for me, work-wise. My husband is 5 days per week in person at work, and was all throughout the pandemic. He never says much about it, so I don't know if it really bothers him or not. Ha! He is also really good at saying, "Fine" when asked about things like work or his day. lol!!!
I really hope your company will drop down the "in office" requirement to 1-2 days for you guys in the future! Working from home suits my life SO much better than working in an office, and I don't think I could go back to working in an office, even in a hybrid environment. My company is fully remote now with a coworking space that I have yet to use. I want to try to do some work dates with coworkers at some of our local coffee shops now that I finally have a work laptop, but haven't gotten that set up just yet.
I would lose my mind over the not printing thing. I am SUCH A tactile/visual person and 100% find it so much easier to interact with certain things in paper. I will admit I don't actually print off that many things, but knowing I couldn't would have been very tough!
I'm so sorry you all have another bug. Ugh. But it is nice that things will likely be more flexible moving forward for working sick days from home.
I actually just had an e-mail this morning about an in-person meeting and it actually threw me for a loop. I've worked remotely for most of the last decade, so don't actually have an external office to return to, but I do expect more in-person meetings in the future which...I mostly don't love. I prefer video calls from home because I only have to pretend to be put together from the waist up.
I talked with my IT person (who is also the IT person for work) and she is still working from home most of the time. On occasion she has to go in, but most of what she does can be done remotely. Same with some others. A friend also retired stopped by one day and said no one was there except on production days. Molly is in one day a week and working from home the rest of the time -- same with all of Quicken/Rocket in Detroit. That printing thing is stupid. How would they know if you did and what's the problem if you shredded. The info is no more secure on the honor system. Odd.
I'm sure it's good seeing people if they are people you want to see. I know if I was working, I wouldn't be ready.
This was so fascinating to read! I'm glad that there are so many pros to being back in the office. But the lack of workout time and the stress around dinner are hard. Hopefully you will continue to build a routine that works for you!
Well, it definitely sounds hard to fit it all in. I think what you're doing with your workouts is perfect- the combination of commuting to work, small children and early morning runs really isn't feasible. I have no idea how you're getting dinner on the table at 5:30- I still struggle with dinner and my schedule is way easier than yours.
My Covid situation was quite different. I'm a massage therapist and I live in Florida- our state had an interesting view of the pandemic (namely, that there wasn't one) so after being closed for eight weeks at the beginning, we opened up again and I've been back at work, in person (you can't do massage remotely!) since May 2020. So other than wearing a mask my life wasn't really that different during Covid. I know that probably sounds pretty weird. Working from home sounds really nice- I hope that in the future you can go in to work less and less.
My company got rid of our office when covid hit. And the one guy who wanted to go in to the office every day has left the company. We all only want to come in for meeting/as required, so right now they are letting us stay remote. We were in a coworking space before, and I assume they will keep renting meeting rooms there when we need, which isn't often.
I am getting flashbacks of how our office was a year or so ago. I am actually surprised it took them this long to "make" you come back, as we have been at 50% for about a year maybe, although in my office that only adds up to about 20-35 people maybe, so its not crowded or anything. We used to have to attest on an app every day but once everyone got vaccinated that went away.
As you know, I have never worked from home and have been going into the office since day one. I think I would have liked to work from home, but mostly for personal reasons. I do like being able to do laundry in the middle of the day when the utility rates are cheaper, and I would not miss commuting. However, I think going in every day kept me sane, or maybe more sane than some, who I know had issues being alone in their home all the time (or stuck with kids, pets, partners etc.)
I hope that spring brings a long-awaited break in the illnesses, for the love of Pete. You have all had more than your fair share! That said, it sounds like your office has adjusted pretty well - and I'm so glad you can now work from home more often (but not quite enough) and that there's a bit of flexibility built in. I'm sorry about the workouts, though - that is tough!
I can only imagine how hard it is to re-adjust. I am glad you see some benefits of going back into the office ( and I am glad to hear they require you to test regularly even though you have a high rate of vaccinated people), but I do hope that they allow a bit more flexibility going forward. They must know that people can work effectively from home.
I am going back to the office for 1day/week in June. We'll see how that goes.
Post a Comment