WFH, RTO, Whatever
Is working from home better? Is working in the office better?
In these very polarised times, it just has to be one or the other. There is no room for nuance. The exchanges on Twitter (occasionally called X now) and LinkedIn look just like this was just another one of those highly contentious, inevitably partisan, issues.
Frankly, I’m quite fed up with humanity’s renewed knack for tribalism. The question I asked above is just one example that happens to be a good fit for this blog. There are endless others.
So. Is working from home better? Is working in the office better? It depends. My answer to that is not so simple as some would have it.
If I have a task in front of me that requires some deep thinking, analysis, reading, research, and writing, I prefer to work from home. There are just less distractions there. Don’t get me wrong - I love meeting the colleagues. I also love the occasional coffee machine chat (I sit near the kitchen when I’m in the office for a reason), but my tendency to freely engage in those can just be counterproductive.
If, on the other hand, I have a day that’s devoted to a mix of focus time and meetings, with no big-and-deep task of the aforementioned nature on the plate, I prefer to be in the office.
Tertium datur: If I have a day with small bits of focus time sprinkled in between a lot of meetings, it doesn’t really matter where I work. I have a slight preference for the office because the occasional coffee machine chat also has a relaxing effect. Some plainly social interactions between meetings take some of the stress out of the frequent context switches.
What’s the point? Companies seem to scramble a bit at the moment. Some mandate a fixed number of office days per week, some leave everything completely open. I think counting and enforcing a number of office days is simply using the wrong metric. It’s like measuring productivity by counting hours spent in front of a screen.
What counts is whether the outcome is right. If, for that to be the case, it is necessary to have everyone in the office for some particular purpose, then so be it, and it is even fine if a company mandates that. Otherwise, it should be fine for people to work from the office or from home however they see fit.
Tags: work