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The thing is about these big companies is they barely have enough office space for their staff. When everyone was in office there was barely enough seats.

I had a contract at one of the banks mentioned and that place was a shit show. No assigned seating… everyday was seating anxiety. My ‚manager‘ had to always find me.

Imagine that leaving your comfortable home trek through whatever extreme weather that is happening to go sit in a office still having to sit through phone calls where you can barely hear someone on the other end.

Plus if you do need to make a call… you gotta go find a place to do that

In office it’d take me like 5-10 mins to go find a space where I wouldn’t create noise pollution. At home… I’m on the phone in seconds. The only real issue is when my internet goes out which has happened twice in 5 years.

Before COVID, if I allowed one of my managers to work from home for a day to be without distractions and finish something complex, I had to do so „on the down low“. In other words I couldn’t be open about the fact that they worked from home. To everyone in the office they had the day off. This was because according to policy we couldn’t be seen as supporting one person working from home while others had to be in the office.

There was even a lot of policy around who got a laptop for this reason. A laptop provided flexibility and normally only the most senior managers or directors or people who might have to be „on call“ to address things after hours got a laptop and remote sign-in credentials.

Once COVID started though we had to quickly pivot and enable people to work from home. The pandemic converged at an ideal time when technology for remote engagement like Zoom and Teams and other tools were working quite well. Not long before you had to sit in a special conference room to have video meetings. If it weren’t for Zoom, for example, we’d be cooked, honestly.

A major concern, for some roles, was the protection of data. So if a payroll person, for example, worked from home how were we ensuring the data was being secured and not shared? Most people don’t have dedicated workspace so where people’s personal details just sitting in a pile on the kitchen table? These were and remain valid concerns. We had to make sure we educated everyone on securing data once we went remote.

I retired earlier this year but my team was on a hybrid model. They were in the office 1 day a week, all on the same day, and another day once a month they’d come in for a full team meeting. The thing was that the organization hadn’t really worked it out because on their in-office days they were often on their laptops attending a zoom meeting because other people they needed to interact with were not in the office on the same days. It was kind of dumb.

I was in a tech role. Absolutely our jobs and my teams job could be done remote. We didn’t all need to be in the same place to pat each other’s backs. If we needed to be on site, we decided that the activity was worth everyone traveling in and we did it. I thought it was working well but the senior executive wanted everyone back in to some level. Thankfully I ended up retired and didn’t need to deal with the commuting too long.