Let me work from home forever, please

I am a person who craves solitude, who needs it in order to function, both in that fill up / replenish energy way and to actually do my work.

So I have not been sad about the forced working from home the past year+. Before, I’d feel a pinch of guilt, wondering how far I could push my boss before they subtly hinted that they “missed” me in the office and would I be in for that Friday meeting?

I hope this past year means I won’t ever have to go back into an office again, except maaaaaybe on occasion. This might not be possible; office leadership has started talking about “when we’re all together again” and re-opening offices in September. They haven’t used the word “family” but that’s the vibe I get. Is everyone desperate to go back to an office, to work among many other people, but me? 

I get missing colleagues, I do miss IRL facetime with mine, and the impromptu coffee breaks and chatter about what you watched last night, or plans for the weekend. For me, the benefits of working from home far outweigh missing that facetime. Not seeing my friends and actual family, the sameness of these walls, that is what is making my nuts, is making me sad.  Not working from home.

I get that some professions are better suited for in-person (teaching, arts, jobs at labs, travel industry jobs and so on) but a design and ad agency? To some, the answer is “yes.” My office prides itself on being collaborative, of different disciplines (the visual designer, the product designer, a creative director, a content strategist, etc) shut into a glass-walled conference room and attacking a whiteboard with sharp lines and loose squiggles. As a researcher, I am sometimes in on these “working sessions,” and I love them. I love feeling part of the process, of making my own squiggle lines, of batting ideas back and forth. It is a needed break from the solo hours I need in order to plan research studies and analyze data. 

But I also see that we can collaborate just fine remotely. Maybe it does work better to be in person. I don’t know, it all depends on you, your team. It still feels strange to me to hear someone in leadership talk in such glowing terms about “being together.” We are colleagues, not a family. And I’m fine in my quiet office at home, and so grateful I have this space. And yet, I felt the energy of being together. I too, am tired of Zoom. 

Where to go from here? Wherever it is, I hope there is flexibility. I hope this year has shown us, especially our bosses, that we need more understanding about our colleagues’ lives. We’ve seen the cats clomping over the keyboard, the babies sitting in laps, kids peeking over their caregiver’s shoulder, heard the dogs howling at the front door. Feeling supported is what we need, not an arbitrary demand on where we do our work. 

I wonder about control, and how much of the general push to go back to in-person work is about bosses wanting more control over their employees’ schedules and work lives. Productivity software already exists for this (and thankfully not something I’ve used). And it’s a ridiculous idea, right? Why do we have such a hard time trusting our colleagues? Trust that we’re all trying, trust that we’ll meet our deadlines. Shouldn’t that be the starting point, an assumed thing? The energy of monitoring could be so much better spent cultivating a supportive work environment, and seeing employees as people with messy lives. Not productivity machines.

Anyways, there are good reasons to work from home and work in-person and crappy ones for both. What I want is for that to be acknowledged and to be able to choose where I work best. That’s what most of us want, to be trusted to make the decisions that work best for us. 

This post was inspired by Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Culture Study. Her newsletter is one of my faves for the interviews with fascinating people you didn’t know you wanted to meet and thoughtful takes on cultural topics as wide ranging as work, gender, and the Baylor influencer twins.

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