People are Fretting About Going Back to the Office

Have you gotten used to working in your sweatpants? Grabbing a quick snack from your fridge before the Zoom meeting? Taking a quick break from that spreadsheet to play with the dog? Not driving in a traffic jam twice a day? Are you thinking you'd rather not give all that up?  

If so, you're not alone. The reasons people don't want to go back to the office range from a loss of freedom and convenience to what seems like a form of agoraphobia. 

According to an article in Newsweek, the leadership consulting firm Best Practices Institute (BPI) has done a study finding that 83 percent of CEOs want employees to return in person, while only 10 percent of employees want to do so. 

The latter figure sounds low to me.  90% don't want to go back? I can't find this study anywhere, including the BPI website.  A blog post, apparently by them, doesn't mention these numbers either. Pew pegs the number who want to keep working from home at 54% which sounds more reasonable to me.

In any case, a lot of us are reluctant.  The reluctance may be due to more than a loss of convenience.  Alison Green has a column in Slate suggesting that we have lost trust in each other:

After watching the government mislead and fail us on such a massive scale, with hundreds of thousands of people dying as a result of those failures, of course people are skeptical now. We’ve spent the past year not being protected by the institutions that were supposed to protect us and learning that we’d have to protect ourselves. So even at companies that have acted responsibly throughout the pandemic, employees are naturally anxious. When you’ve spent months watching businesses reopen while case numbers rose and governors giving that their blessing, as unsurprising new waves of infections followed, it’s pretty understandable to feel apprehensive of any new timelines for a return to “normalcy.”

People who have spent the past year carefully protecting themselves from being infected aren't so hot about the idea of going back to a poorly ventilated congregate setting with their covidiot coworkers for 40 hours a week. 

We've got to hope that the virus will diminish to the point where we won't have to worry about stupid coworkers anymore. And it's inevitable that work will return to normal at some point. If you are required to go back and freaking out about it, the Evening Standard has some advice for how best to cope. 

Image by Malachi Witt from Pixabay 

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