FEATURE
true danger passed and our employers finally, wearily, called us back to the office, many of us said — Wait, what? Why? Which is actually a good question to ask. Why? We need to work, but when work can just as easily come to us, do we need to go to work? According to a 2020 study, 44% of companies worldwide said Oh, hell yes, and offered no remote work at all. That number’s probably dropped since then, but still for many CEOs, remote work, flex work, telework is at best a work in progress. Even Google, which wrote the book on employee engagement, didn’t exactly get out of the blocks when they called their 165K workers back to the mothership in April. According to Fortune 500, things did not go swimmingly, “Some schlepped back for the first time in two years only to find themselves without a desk. Even the return date came with a string of misfires.” From management’s POV, the most common reason cited for not allowing flex work is Company Culture, for which many companies have made quite an investment. How does one display exemplary company culture if nobody shows up at HQ? Famous quote from late 1990s business poohbah Peter Drucker: Culture eats strategy for lunch! The idea being that once you discover the holy grail of company culture, your operation becomes a hive of shiny, happy worker bees in logo polos humming along like Santa’s elves minus Herbie.
It seems that work is having a moment. And while it’s true that nobody saw it coming, it’s brought to you by computers (technology), the internet (technology), the digital age (technology), and of all things, a global pandemic that exiled us to spare bedrooms (with all that technology), allowing us to conclude that as far as work is concerned, we’d really rather stay home. And that’s sort of a big deal if you think about it. We stopped doing the things we’ve been doing for decades: alarm, coffee, shower, shave, breakfast, get dressed, start the car, fire up the podcast, spend an hour in traffic, show our three-dimensional faces at our three-dimensional jobs, then do it all in reverse eight hours later. With perhaps an additional cocktail. Or two. Instead, we’ve made ourselves qua- si-presentable above the waist, parked in a semi-private corner of the house, and done the same jobs we’ve always done but in a completely different way. Sure, Zoom in our pajama bottoms felt odd at first, but we got used to our pajama bottoms. So much so that after a year or two when the
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