Why I'm ditching remote work for the office
I no longer believe WFH is the silver bullet
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Let me start with a quick — and hopefully obvious — disclaimer:
Working from home is a brilliant solution for parents or people with caring obligations that make travelling to work difficult. It can also be a life-changing option for people living with disabilities, or those who don’t have promising employment opportunities locally. There is no one-size-fits-all way of working that can be applied to every single person on earth. These are simply my personal reflections after 6+ years of both semi- and full-time remote work in marketing agencies and B2B SaaS companies.
Phew! Now that that’s out of the way…
I recently accepted a job that requires me to go into the office five days per week. I am not unwell — in fact, it was a conscious decision. Reactions from my friends ranged from confusion to abject horror:
Why the f**k would you do that?
I would never let my employer control me like that.
Ew, I could NEVER go into the office again.
The debate about working from home is heated 🌋
If you have so much as peeked at LinkedIn over the past three years, you’ll have seen at least one post waxing lyrical about working from home, and that employers who expect their teams to come into the office are on the wrong side of history. You’ll hear how they saved so much money on transport and eating out. You’ll hear how they can complete quick tasks and errands throughout the day. You’ll hear about how working from home transformed their lives and their health. These posts are so dramatic, so evangelical, that it leaves the reader with the impression that working from home is a magical unicorn rainbow utopia of constant productivity.
The main discourse orbits the topic of trust: employers need to trust their employees to work from home. Discussions on which jobs can be done from home always seem to arrive at the conclusion that if its possible to do your job at home, then you absolutely should be doing that.
It’s all very one-note. People rarely talk about the downsides of working from home, and I think that’s a problem.
I’ve worked from home in varying amounts over the past six years. I have experienced the following scenarios:
One day per week in the office (always on Thursday, enforced)
100% remote work (mainly during the pandemic)
Flexible work (two days per week in the office, the days decided by me but also not really enforced)
However, I no longer believe that it’s the silver bullet for modern life. Now that I am preparing to re-enter old fashioned office work, I spent some time unpacking my mixed feelings about working from home. While it wasn’t all bad, it didn’t have the miraculous impact on my life that others claim.
WFH blurs the line between work and personal life
If my home becomes my office then it’s no longer my refuge. I am a big fan of having dedicated spaces — a place to eat, a place to watch TV, a place to work, a place to sleep. I have a strict no TV in the bedroom rule for this reason!
Seeing my laptop on the kitchen table bent my thoughts towards work projects, making it difficult to enforce that all-important mental distance. If you are inclined towards workaholism, this can be a disaster. The time saved commuting becomes extra time to work, and without external cues (like cleaners entering the office or trains running infrequently later in the evening), suddenly you can find yourself working until ten and skipping dinner several times a week. I had a better work life balance when I worked full time in the office because it forced me to have a more regimented schedule.
Working from home also allows our private lives to spill into our work lives. I’ve literally watched colleagues making cups of tea in their kitchen. I’ve had meetings with people who have a sick child sleeping on their chest or a hair towel wound in their wet hair after a shower. None of this is necessarily bad, but they also feel like weirdly intimate moments to display in front of people you work with. With the exception of the handful of colleagues who develop into friends, I prefer to err on the side of professional.
My apartment is full of distractions
An oft-repeated argument against office work is that offices are very distracting environments. There’s too many people, it’s noisy, someone is on a call next to you, etc. Offices are obviously not distraction-free, but since when is being at home not distracting?! My apartment is probably the most distracting place imaginable! There are deliveries arriving, laundry to be hung up, a bed calling you to just lay down and sleep. This is the point where one of the benefits of WFH unravelled for me: my days were sometimes so punctuated with home-based distractions that my work felt fragmented and unfocused.
Making an effort with my appearance supercharges my mental health
This sounds very superficial, but hear me out. There’s something about getting dressed and making yourself look presentable. The simple act of putting yourself together can feel like an antidote to depression.
I find the psychological impact of clothing very interesting: how a power suit makes you feel invincible versus how woollen jumpers make you feel calm and cosy. Of course, this has nothing to do with personal style or whether or not you wear make-up — whatever makes you feel ready and confident to take on the world will do. It’s a similar feeling to dragging yourself to the gym even when it is the last place you want to be; those are always the best workouts.
There’s nothing that stops you doing any of this while working from home, but in my experience, the lifestyle really pulls you hard in the other direction. It’s so easy for sweatpants, hoodies and unbrushed hair to become your uniform. The novelty of taking a meeting in your pyjamas wears off quickly.
It can be lonely
The trend of remote work collided with the collapse of many traditional, community-based or in-person activities. People rarely go to a single sports club anymore, they attend random classes using Urban Sports Club and speak to nobody while they are there. People don’t chat each other up at the bar, they swipe left and right on apps. People don’t go to church anymore, which, for all of its flaws, was a way of bringing local communities together.
For those of us who live in cities and work remotely, the amount of time we spend socialising and engaging with people face to face has shrunk to a miserably small amount. This all feeds into the well-documented loneliness epidemic, with Gen-Z being the worst affected: 73% of Gen-Z reports feeling alone sometimes or always.
Our comfort zones are too comfortable sometimes
Remote work is often touted as the perfect solution for introverted people, but I would take that with a pinch of salt. For introverts, remote work can impact your ability to make connections outside of your direct team. If you’re an ambitious person, this can really mess with forging a strong reputation or building a rapport with senior mentors who can help you a lot in your career later on.
Overly avoidant behaviours seem to be on the rise in recent years. People feel the urge to pull away from anything that causes them a moment of discomfort. TikTok is full of references to bedrotting and hiding from the world. Often my friends say things like “ugh, I can’t stand my colleagues” when I talk about working in the office. While I appreciate that work dynamics vary, something about this always confused me. Did you really expect that you will be best friends with everyone you work with?
We seem to have forgotten that a little bit of social friction is necessary and healthy. Working in person with people I didn’t get along with and dealing with situations I didn’t enjoy made me resilient. It sharpened my ability to read body language and approach people who intimidate me. It helped me to understand who I want to be as a person and the energy I want to project when I enter a room.
In tech companies, I think you need to physically be together to build great products
This is very specific to my industry and possibly one of my biggest takeaways from the last few years. I think companies building software products need to be physically together in the same location. Especially in an early stage (seed to Series B), this can actually make or break the success of the product. At the very least, Product and Engineering need to sit together.
This is where the magic happens. Humans are social and collaborative and for me, nothing beats bouncing off one another while working towards a common goal. In person, you can hash out solutions faster and often have moments of sparring that wouldn’t happen in remote set-ups. LinkedIn’s WFH advocates often say things like: “offices aren’t essential for success, results are.” I find results are better when the team are together.
Meetings, meetings and more meetings
The amount of time I spend in meetings has increased dramatically since the pandemic and it didn’t decrease once life returned to normal. When dealing with remote or semi-remote teams, it’s so easy for every discussion to become a 30 minute meeting. Suddenly, you’re spending seven or eight hours a day in meetings — and expected to actually do all the work from said meetings deep into the evening.
I’m not even going to touch remote office parties or remote collaboration sessions on FigJam because they are so lame.
I’m also sick of the über polite meeting culture that has festered thanks to online work. Remote meetings enable entitled people (mostly middle-aged men) who love the sound of their own voice to speak for ten minutes straight. What’s more, we now have to take turns while talking. In Microsoft Teams there is literally a hand-raise feature, like in school. To quote one of my favourite comedians, Robby Hoffman: “Why did we let the most boring talkers on the planet make the rules for talking?”
Commutes aren’t that bad in most cases
People whinge so much about commutes. Then when I ask them how long it takes them to get to their office, they respond with thirty minutes? I’m sorry, what? That really isn’t that bad! If you face a 3+ hour daily commute in busy traffic, then I get it, that’s a different story. Commuting can be a productive time where multi-tasking can be put to good use: I typically catch up on emails, call my parents or listen to a podcast. You can try incorporating your workout into your commute by walking, running or cycling home. It can also be a great time to engage in some active meditation, allowing you to pause and reflect on what happened during the day.
Semi-remote also kind of sucks
Semi-remote work is what most companies seem to have settled on these days because it’s the path of least resistance. In most semi-remote work environments I’m familiar with, people come in on different days. This gives employees some level of flexibility while also ensuring office spaces are used and necessary in-person collaboration can still happen.
However this approach can be a real culture killer because the team is never fully together. You end up with a random assortment of people scattered around the office, sitting alone amidst clusters of empty desks. The Marketing team might be there, but not Sales — so you end up jumping onto a Teams call at your desk anyways.
At this point you may be thinking that I’m an industry plant hired to write propaganda about returning to the office. Don’t worry, I’m far from that. Despite my mixed experiences with WFH, I understand and support what drives people to want to work from home and to demand more work/life balance from their employers.
When you scratch the surface, I think a lot of the vitriol aimed at in-office work is really about crappy employers. Working from home became the problem to solve, but the bigger, more complex problem is that the way we work in general needs a lot of reform. The pressures of modern life are enormous: job insecurity, the cost of living, extortionate child and elderly care costs, the mental health crisis. In the midst of all this, working people have been treated with utter contempt. Those of us who work in tech have heard and lived the horror stories: vast amounts of unpaid overtime, getting ghosted during an interview process after completing hours of free work, being laid off before your contract even begins after relocating your entire life to a new country. It’s the wild west out there.
This post by My Unserious Life perfectly captures the treatment that we are expected to ✨just deal with✨ in the search for gainful employment:
“Andreas, framed by a stock image of the Golden Gate Bridge, joined our Google Meet two minutes late, which is considered a crime in Germany. However, I decided to politely ignore it, knowing well that if I had been the one two minutes late, I would have immediately been canceled. He greeted me with, 'Hi, Lisa,' and I politely told him that my name is indeed Sarah, but I’d rather have a potential boss mistake my name than a potential husband, so I smiled it away. In the following minutes, he told me how important he was, how much money he made, how busy he was, and that he was in desperate need of a freelancer who would be responsible for his entire marketing strategy, which solely consisted of LinkedIn and paid €10-25 per hour before taxes.”
Bad employers don’t stop being bad if they offer you the chance to work from home. That dreadful attitude will also make your remote set-up feel like jail, I guarantee it. You’ll be asked to attend meetings at any time from 7am to lunchtime to 8pm, because you’re at home — right? They’ll call on you to speak in online meetings even if you have nothing valuable to say. They’ll check your Slack analytics to see who you are messaging and ask why you’ve created a private channel with these people. They’ll roll out the attendance reports on meetings and monitor if you’re actually sitting in front of the screen.
In the headlines, some of the biggest names in business are being tossed around in the remote VS in-office debate. Amazon, the Eye of Sauron in this Mordor of late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, sparked waves of controversy by implementing a return to office policy earlier this year. The response from their execs was that employees unhappy with the new policy can simply leave. Tech giant Spotify snapped back, with their HR chief Katarina Berg stating: “You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children. Work is not a place you come to, it’s something you do.”
While there’s a lot of nuance to this and certainly no right answer, I do think if more employers made the effort to actually create workplaces that are understanding, nourishing and challenging, more people would be open to coming into the office regularly.
Final thoughts: the next generation
This discussion feels timely because I’m no longer a young professional™ — a new generation is now entering the workforce. There are many people in their early twenties who have never worked in an office, and I think it’s slightly misguided for us to preach to them that this has absolutely nothing to offer.
This post by She Thinks She Says shows how remote work can do a disservice to young people who are at the very start of their careers:
I felt like I was always bothering my manager because there were no quick, casual moments—just long, awkward back-and-forths over messages before giving up and launching into a screen-share circus, hoping to understand what I was doing wrong. My imposter syndrome? Off the charts.
When we were finally told to come into the office two days a week, I realised I hadn’t built a single connection. No one to grab coffee with, no one to share lunch with. I was starting from scratch in a company I’d already been a part of for a year. Eventually, friendships formed, but it took twice as long—because, guess what? Most people weren’t coming in either.
These words broke my heart. Our society has already left Gen-Z nothing and now we are busy taking away in-person work without giving much of thought to how this might impact younger people. Almost everyone I see preaching about the benefits of remote work on LinkedIn is aged 35 or over.
My intention with this post is to shed some light on my personal experience of working from home and the not-often-mentioned negatives that can come with it. I’m not trying to make the case that everyone should go back to the office — far from it. I just want us to remove the rose-tinted-glasses for a split second and have a balanced discussion about the way we work in the 21st century.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about remote, semi-remote or in-office work in the comments!
I really appreciate your perspective, Caoilainn 🖤
I wanted to share some thoughts on this. Working for a large corporation like mine, things operate a bit differently. In my current company, we have offices worldwide, including in ALL big cities in Germany. As a result, most of the teams are distributed. None of my team members or stakeholders worked in the Berlin office for the first four years. In the beginning, I used to go to the office a lot, but I would end up spending my entire day in meeting rooms at the office. It would put additional pressure on me to find a meeting room I can reserve for the whole day, which is extremely challenging in our office.
In a customer-facing role, it is even more important to have privacy, even if you are within the walls of the company you are working for. I attempted to sit at my desk in the office and take calls from there, but this disturbed my colleagues around me. I've had colleagues slam the door because, apparently, I was laughing too loud 🥲
Another critical aspect to consider is that part of my colleagues including my manager work fully remotely, living in small towns and cities in Germany with no nearby office. While it's great that they can still be part of the company and that the company can hire talent from anywhere in the country and not limit itself to big cities, this constant push to return to the office devalues our fully remote colleagues. It's as if they are considered less valuable if they are not part of an office. We need to understand and respect that not everyone wants to move to a big city, and they shouldn't be made to feel bad because they have a remote contract. Their contributions are just as valuable as those of us who work in the office.
It's a complex issue that requires a balanced approach. It's about creating a work environment that is fair and flexible for everyone.
Are all of us WFHers having the same epiphany at the same time?? It’s really comforting to read other people’s experiences with this, because I totally relate. But then I also struggle greatly with the inflexibility of office work (why do I as an adult need to get permission from another adult to schedule in a doctors appointment??). It’s really nice to see the double edged nature of this discussed with so much nuance 👏👏👏