A post-pandemic workplace

It’s been nearly a year since the last lockdown, the omicron variant wreaking havoc over holiday social plans. I took my first international trip since March 2020. I caught COVID-19. I got my booster shot. I resumed international travel right where I left off, starting with a trip to Paris. It seems that only people concerned about it now are the ones living in China and those who intend on traveling there. Life is back to normal. No masks, no gathering restrictions. COVID-19 is an excuse to avoid social gatherings, but so is any other cold. Back to sticking fingers in drinks at bars before eating peoples’ faces. Back to crowding in elevators and subways.

However, the pandemic has permanently changed how work is done. The most visible way, and also one that triggers every other change, is remote work. The ingenuity of the capitalist machine continued working its parts even as the physical world completely shut down. What it didn’t count on, was the appeal of remote work to many of its constituents, and their desire to continue doing so. Consequently, most office jobs now offer some sort of hybrid role, allowing its employees to work from the comfort of their homes some to all of the time. Even my company, which values face time enough to ask me take a plane to a different city on a regular basis, has instituted a hybrid policy, mandating only two days in the office a week.

One trend I noticed is the enlargement of meetings. Now that meetings are often virtual, and there are no physical capacity constraints or minutes lost walking from one room to another, meetings have grown larger then ever. Very often, there will be ten person meetings where only two or three people speak; even those who have their cameras on are often unfocused, instead doing other work on the side.

Stemming from this is a phenomenon I have named parasocial work relationships. A parasocial relationship is a recently coined term used to describe one-way relationships that people feel they have with celebrities, especially streamers and reality television stars that share every aspect of their lives while looking directly at the camera. I’ve noticed myself and others greeting upper management too glibly in the office. Not to the point of causing offense of course, but the enlargement of meetings has resulted in many long town halls, staff meetings, post-mortems, and the like to be open to many more people, though the number of presenters remain few. Everyone is well-aware that the VP doesn’t know their name, but that they have long interactions that feel personal once a week now gives the impression they do. In this aspect, the pandemic might have actually made the workplace feel more intimate.

Management acceptance that real, productive work from home is possible has also been a big change. Now, if it’s inconvenient to come into the office, whether it’s due to a child’s activity, a snowstorm, or a late night out, management is much more willing to agree to a day working remotely, even if the company has an in-office or hybrid model. Conversely, this has negatively affected sick days, which quite honestly don’t exist anymore. Unless someone is hospitalized without access to internet, their hands, or a large chunk of their brain, no one takes sick days. After all, you can work from home. Though this seems terrible, most corporate employees, even those who aren’t particularly motivated, would rather not take a sick day and let the work get ahead of them. Regular or project-based work just piles up higher when one isn’t in the office. Best to take it light, but still answer some emails and have an urgent call or two. This also positively affects workplace health: since productive work can be done at home, and it’s now considered considerate to work from home during a day off, people will do so, leading to fewer diseases in the office.

Despite being back in the office, this has led to the trend of having a remote option for most meetings. But more than simply accommodating people who might be working from home, it has several other added benefits. Sometimes the physical capacity of meeting rooms cannot accommodate all the people that are invited to these new large meetings. Sometimes, employees will benefit by listening into a meeting, despite doing other monotonous work on the side, but that would be considered extremely rude during an in-person meeting. Sometimes, it turns out that the majority of attendees happen to be working remotely or located in different offices for the meeting, so all attendees end up taking the meeting remotely; this works well when the office is unpopulated, but is extremely annoying when everyone else in nearby cubes are also conducting their own remote meetings.

An important realization that working from home has wrought is the acute realization of how much heads down work time one does. Prior to working from home, any time spent in the office was considered work, and rightfully so: most people wouldn’t be choosing to have dry sandwiches in a cafeteria or watercooler conversation if it wasn’t for work. The counterpoint to that is that much of the time spent in the office for most corporate employees, be it an account manager who is there fifteen hours a week, a marketing manager who is there thirty-five, a consultant who is there sixty, or an accountant who is putting in eighty hours during busy season, there is significant off-time, time waiting for someone to return that last email, time watching the clock inch closer to five, and time trapped in conversations with unlikeable colleagues.

With all that time returned to the employee, it becomes clear how much work there actually is to do. In fairness, seven or even six hours of intensive work is exhausting for most people, and it becomes clear that’s why lunchbreaks and watercoolers existed. But now it’s evident to me that I probably do thirty hours of job description work on a typical week: this excludes travel, work related functions, and socializing. And as the office worker reclaims their schedule, work reclaims a little of them in turn. Even for the most unwilling employee, they eventually come to realize that there’s no point of putting work off to the next day: they’re going to have to do it at some point, so why not now? Even if now is at nine in the evening.

So, has the pandemic changed work for the better or worse? I’d say for the better. Not only has the advent of remote work shown the futility of working Monday to Friday in the office, but it also has allowed everyone to reexamine many other axioms they held as untouchable with regard to corporate work. I think not only has more freedom been returned to the employee, but work as a whole has become more honest and transparent. Not just a lining, but a whole silver cloud.