In-the-office days

Remote work is great. Maybe working in the office – at least a little bit – could be even better.

It is no longer an untouchable request to ask an employer for remote working days – or even an entire remote job. Scientific studies on working from home (or wherever you set up your desk) have shown that distributed teams and individuals are highly productive, employee turnover decreases and the financial upsides for companies themselves are many.

All of the clamour for flexibility sometimes drowns out the downside of remote work. There’s isolation, of course. There’s also the irony of gaining freedom and then ending up tethered to a company’s mode of communication to prove accountability. Some workers experience even higher burn-out due to a slavish devotion to the company that’s approved their remote set-up.

But when office work is soul-crushing and remote work is alienating, is there a happy middle? Perhaps the answer isn’t all or nothing. ‘In-the-office days’, in which remote workers are encouraged to work in the company’s space and non-local workers are brought in periodically, may give a distributed workforce a much-needed boost. One poll showed that partially remote workers were actually happier than ones who were entirely remote. In-the-office days may not be the antidote to all work woes, but a little balance couldn’t hurt.

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Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.