Ode to the home office
When Covid hit, the whole world was like an ant hive during the heavy rain. Suddenly it turned out not everyone needs to be in the office, not everyone needs to commute, not everyone needs to do a flashmob at every hip place.
Then years later everyone wants people back in the good old hamster wheel. Yes I know, a lot of people did not like it to be home, with the people they “love”, but let’s ignore that for a moment.
Some people absolutely require the face to face socialization in work or as I like to call it “to mingle”. You don’t really work, just wander around the office, talk to many people and then everybody thinks you are busy as hell. Been there, done that. We are a family after all no?
Ohh, it’s 11:00 am already, shall we talk about lunch?
And the same people who continued with their hobby and introduced the “can we hop on a quick call” or other classics. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on these people, I just wanted to highlight the fact that there are many others who don’t require this type of umbilical cord with coworkers.
And this story is as old as we invented co-working. When people worked in private offices, then someone was always standing at the door asking for some hush hush.
When people used to work in cubicles some manager always appeared with a mug of coffee and said “that would be great…”
And in the era of open office you didn’t even need to be a participant, because you heard everything all the time, then God gave us a holy salvation, the noise canceling headphones. So one more physical movement when someone appeared at your desk and in the best case you did not get a heart attack. It really became the symbol of “office culture”.
So when people suddenly were cast back to their own cave some actually found a long lost - or never known - feeling of calmness and focus. Some of course felt unbearable loneliness and uselessness so started to add at least one sync call with each team.
And there are the people with kids at home, well, they did it to themselves init? Sorry not sorry.
But back to the main point. If you don’t count the work time disruptions and inefficiency, the lack of focus, you still have to address one more elephant in the room:
Yes, commuting. Ding ding ding.
And the average person commutes at least 1 hour a day but sometimes much longer. 1 damn hour. That makes your workday 9 hours long, your workweek 45 hours. At least.
You know what you can do with that 1 hour?
- eat a healthy meal and chill a bit
- read a few chapters of a book that entertains you
- receive a full body massage
- extensively pet your fur-babies
- listen to your favorite album with a cup of tea
- learn a new skill not even related to your work
- have some quality time with your significant other
- exercise, yoga, whatever makes you feel good
But we are forced to sit in a car, a bus, a train, a tin can and go to a place where we’re gonna do much less work because we already arrive tired and facing constant harassment.
Yes, yes, we are family, we are a team, we collaborate, lost in translation… yes. And no.
You just don’t respect your coworkers enough to let them do what is best for them - and overall for the whole work. Simple as that.
These days most of the job ads are about hybrid work where they generously let you work from home on Fridays, or they just say it’s remote but you need to stay in the city - as if you were under investigation. Ridiculous.
If you deliver why does it matter where you are doing it from? And it matters to whom? To the people who don’t deliver anything just marching around imitating work?
Oh, but what about blockers? We can’t allow that!
Well then, maybe start using the gray matter a bit and maybe the blocker is not even a blocker, you were just looking for an excuse. No need to answer. I let everyone think this through inside. Just put “being offended” aside a bit and think about it.
You are welcome.