Working From Home Is Here to Stay (for the Better)

For many employees, being forced back into the office is now a dealbreaker

Photo: Unsplash

Thanks to the pandemic, we have a once-in-a-lifetime reset on the way we work. After a forced evacuation from workplaces in March of 2020, 50% of employees now say they don’t want to go back to the office full time. The bird is out of the cage. We have tasted freedom — freedom from commutes, freedom from mandated “face time” at the office and too much air travel for work.

We now know what’s possible. We can work and get our jobs done more efficiently working remotely than we ever imagined possible. For many employees, being forced to go into the office every day is now a dealbreaker. More than a quarter of those surveyed in a recent McKinsey study said they would consider switching employers if their organization returned to fully on-site work.

Many of us in the field of organization and leader development didn’t see this coming. But hybrid work, it appears, is here to stay.

And we should all embrace it. We have a rare opportunity to make our work lives more purposeful, productive, agile and flexible.

I remember my first “remote” working experience. I dramatically quit my corporate job in 1991, halfway through a master’s program and…