Is WFH here to stay?

Covid19 has upended the way we work. With non essential workers working from home (WFH), there are mixed opinions on how optimal this setup really is, citing declines in productivity, difficulty in creating culture, and of course the fact that there is expensive office space leased:

The only argument against wfh at my old job was b/c they had just signed a super expensive lease in a new building and did a major renovation. They wanted bodies there to make it make sense. I worked for a global firm with team members across the country. I could be anywhere 😂

— DaBean (@HoneyBadger10) April 11, 2020

Aside from the technical aspects, the one big obstacle against WFH is how you establish ‘culture’ w/i the organization. I think this is difficult to do through a computer screen. The personal contact and interactions play a big part in fostering this.

— Chris Dulaba (@CALLIDUSDevMgmt) April 11, 2020

Others perceive it to be working very well, and are planning on how to keep remote work going well after the pandemic.

CEO of a 400+ employee business says WFH is working well, he may not renew his SF lease to save $10m a year (office + lunches etc) and instead do a couple of all-hands offsites a year (much cheaper). Lots of others must be thinking similarly- CRE could be permanently altered.

— Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi) April 10, 2020

There is one point that a few people have made online, which is that it is very different to be a remote first company doing WFH, than a company that has always worked from offices, to suddenly move to a WFH setup. The employees in this second group will not really get to benefit remote work the way that the employees from the remote-first company will.

Crisis driven WFH is not the same as an intentional remote structure.

Corona is causing this massive experiment in WFH.

On one hand it might accelerate the move to fully-distributed workplaces.

On the other, I'm already hearing from many on how they don't like WFH – missing people/social rituals, running up against limits of tools, etc.

— Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk) March 5, 2020

Apparently, mid-level managers hate it already, and there are some theories as to why:

hot take:
many mid-level managers are redundant communication bridges and social glue/oversight for inefficient processes

— Andreas Klinger 🏝 (@andreasklinger) March 5, 2020

Regardless of how well or horribly WFH is going for your company, employee burnout is a very real risk in either scenario.

Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns recently wrote:

The lines between work and non-work are blurring in new and unusual ways, and many employees who are working remotely for the first time are likely to struggle to preserve healthy boundaries between their professional and personal lives. […] Afternoons will blend with evenings; weekdays will blend with weekends; and little sense of time off will remain.

3 Tips to Avoid WFH Burnout – HBR

The article is excellent, and the main takeaway in one word: boundaries. Create them, enforce them, and don’t compromise.

It’s too early to tell if WFH is here to stay, but the way we think about work will surely never be the same.