My hardcore fans are going to be scared shitless now, and I would advise them to sit down before reading any further, but I’m just going to say it anyway: you have to go back to the office.
I don’t say this to the people who already work in the office regularly. No, this column is for all the people who have been at home full-time since corona because they are so productive there. To those people I say: kick your ass and go back to the office. Yes, it scares me too!
Because I was such an inveterate homeworker myself. I have never been so productive, never felt so comfortable in my own skin, never had so much peace and quiet to concentrate on my work, never been surrounded by stimuli in the editorial office and never been in train rush hour again – wonderful.
But I came back from that last month. Why? Because the Center for People and Buildings says I should go back to the office. And if the Center for People and Buildings says so, then it is.
Because my heroes work at that Center. It is a solid scientific knowledge and research center, affiliated with TU Delft, which was my oracle long before corona when it came to the question: which offices are the best and which factors contribute to job satisfaction? They are investigating that.
So they know about the harmful effects of too many stimuli at work, about the disastrous consequences of overcrowded office spaces – stress, burnout – and they always came up with a well-substantiated story. No opinions, but facts.
So when the director of that institute, Jacqueline Schlangen, recently told a conference that in the long term the consequences of working from home are detrimental to both employers and employees, I reluctantly had to adjust my opinion about working from home.
Of course, in the short term, working from home full-time has many advantages, Schlangen also said: autonomy, less travel time, more concentration, more attention to the ‘work-life balance’ (I always call that the ‘wykh’ – laundry, yoga, children and pets). But if we continue like this, we will become dumber, more acidic, worse at our work, and antisocial, grumpy colleagues – I’ll say it now in my own words.
Schlangen obviously says this in a more nuanced way. She says that you “learn, innovate and develop less” at home on your own. That you may be more productive at home, but that you also become lonely, continue to do everything in the same way, find it increasingly difficult to find your way around your company and hardly learn anything anymore because you talk less to colleagues when you work at home in your bathrobe .
Because it may seem like you don’t do anything during a busy office day and just chat, have lunch, meet, call and hang around, in reality you ‘unconsciously’ learn more on such a day than you think, says Schlangen.
You learn who the new AI chief is, and a colleague teaches you a handy trick to carry out a job more efficiently. The boy who never says anything in the meeting turns out to be smart and sharp at the coffee machine. It’s so much more pleasant to work together if you’ve been throwing up next to each other on Friday night – I’ll just give you some random examples.
If you continue to work from home full-time, you may continue to work happily, but you will continue to go around in your own circle, you will become more indifferent, and the quality of your work will slowly deteriorate. “If we don’t intervene, we are collectively going to ruin ourselves,” Schlangen said at the conference. If you stay home full-time, you will ultimately be the loser.
And so last week I was frightened and went straight back to the office. For a ‘diversity and inclusion training’, for a lunch with a dear colleague, for a meeting about my new podcast, for a lecture from the editors-in-chief about the new journalistic season, for a drink with the entire editorial staff. I was napping on the train back, but I had a million ideas for columns, felt like I belonged somewhere and had met a few new faces. I’m going again next week!
I thought: maybe we should see the office more as a school: as an adolescent you prefer to stay in bed, but thirty years later you appear to have learned more than you ever thought. But I also thought, and I am very honest about this: how wonderful that I can work from home for the rest of the week.
I haven’t told the Center for People and Buildings yet.