Google, Amazon and others are some of the US Businesses Expecting to Return to Offices

[engine]

Google, Amazon and other companies are saying they expect employees to be returning to offices in the coming weeks and months.

Google and other tech companies that shuttered their offices at the start of the pandemic are gradually reopening work spaces as vaccines become widely available. Facebook told employees that its Menlo Park headquarters would open in May, and Uber has allowed a limited number of employees to return to its San Francisco offices. Other tech companies, like Twitter, have allowed employees to work from home indefinitely.

[nytimes.com...]

Amazon said it expects some employees to begin transitioning away from remote work this summer, with most of its staff back at the office by the fall.

[cnbc.com...]

[ronin]

One thing I've really learned during the last year of lockdown is how much some people really value their office.

I left the office in Jan 2003 and, 18 years later, not only do I still not miss it, but I still feel a sense of victory that I am able to work, no longer constrained by some miserable, anachronistic form of semi-captivity, imposed by the suits.

And so, I believed, naively, that everyone else might feel the same - even the ones that said they wouldn't - after they took their first sweet gasp of geographical liberation.

But it turns out there's a spectrum (when isn't there a specturm?) ranging from those who'd happily travel to and spend hours in the office every workday for the rest of their working lives to those who, if they never saw the office again, wouldn't miss it for a second.

The moral of this story (as in so many other stories) is:

people are different and there is no one-size, fits-all solution.

So, perhaps, what we should strive towards is not everyone working from home most of the time or everyone commuting to the office most of the time, but enabling most people to work where they feel at their happiest and most productive most of the time.

[engine]

I was talking with some business people about this and some are preferring remote working, whilst others are looking forward to returning to the office environment.

Part of the issue for many is that they crave the company of colleagues. Others are not good at working on their own and require some form of team and management to achieve the best.

Look at the animal and insect world and you'll see many parallels. Ants can achieve a great deal together, or the Pride of Lions, or the Meerkats, all great teamwork. It works the other way with solitary animals, too, such as Polar Bears and Snow Leopards, or Solitary Bees and Wasps, etc.

Humans, mostly, are social creatures, and working in teams and groups together is important for many. Whether the best can be achieved through a Zoom call is yet to be proven.

[lammert]

For existing employees, working at home is an alternative. But new employees have to learn the company culture and the tips and tricks of their daily tasks. The only place where that is possible is a location where other employees are nearby. I am not surprised by this move of Google and Amazon. Interesting to see if Twitter also changes course. But with Jack Dorsey running the company partly from a French Polynesian island, they may not want to change their policies soon.

[NickMNS]

Ants can achieve a great deal together,

Ants are interesting creatures. Ants certainly work as a collective to the point where one can ask whether an individual ant is in fact an "individual" or simply a detached member of the "individual" which would be the nest. But, when you really watch how ants work they don't typically work side by side. They conduct work individually fanning out somewhat randomly, and only once they have discovered a substantial food source do they then all direct their energy at mining it as a group. Moreover, their work is truly remote and as such have developed a system of remote communication such that other member of the nest can find the path to the discovered food source.

More on ant communication:
[sciencemag.org...]

The takeaway from this ant analogy is that needs of companies varies, and some may discover that working in a distributed fashion may provide better results where as for others it is less than optimal. The pandemic has allowed or forced many companies to test the "we must all work in one place all during the same hours of the day" norm.

[ronin]

Relevant:

[bbc.co.uk...]

[tangor]

I suspect that office work will return. After all, company spirit (and management control) are not possible for a workforce scattered hither and yon.

Time will tell.