Working from home is still very much an option

With all the headlines about people being pointlessly - indeed, worse than pointlessly - forced back into workplaces, you may have gained a different impression.

Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office life, American workplaces are settling into a new rhythm. Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home, a research team that tracks remote employment has found. And when you look at all workers – and not just those in remote-friendly positions – they’re working remotely 1.4 days a week, or 28% of the time.

That’s a huge change from 2019, when remote work accounted for only 7% of the nation’s paid workdays, even if it’s down from the height of the pandemic in 2020, when 61.5% of all work was remote. And it’s a giant leap from 1965, the dawn of telework. At that time, fewer than 0.5% of all paid workdays were out of the office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As management professors who study remote work and collaboration, we’ve learned a lot about remote work’s challenges and its often underappreciated advantages. In analyzing the latest data, we’ve observed that employers and employees are still trying to strike the balance between working from home and at the office. That’s why employers’ requirements for in-person work don’t always align with their employees’ preferences. - The Conversation

Some things shouldn't go back to "normal"

I seem to have unthinkingly taken for granted that everyone would realize now that many don't have to, for example, waste irreplaceable hours of their lives sitting in traffic every damn day, any more. Silly me.

But the problem with “getting back to normal” seems to be two-fold. One problem is that some people don’t want to go back to normal. As Anders Melin and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou noted in Bloomberg, “A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work.” Working from home has created a culture of families that eat lunch together, of pets that enjoy midday strolls, of life that is just a little bit calmer. My husband, who used to spend one week a month in California for work, no longer makes his regular cross-country trips. As Sigal Samuel writes for Vox, “The pandemic has proven that remote work is totally feasible for many jobs, validating people’s suspicions that our standard model of office work is arbitrary, unnecessarily taxing, and ultimately exploitative, sometimes forcing people to choose between their well-being and their career.” Why go back to the elements of normal life which were, in themselves, completely pointless? - Vogue