Why the rise of the TW&Ts is dividing the workplace - "Supporters of the government plan will highlight surveys carried out during the pandemic which suggested employees were just as productive, if not more, when working from home. But research based on hard data tells a different story. A joint study by the University of Essex and the University of Chicago earlier this year looked at the working practices of 10,000 IT staff and found productivity fell by 20 per cent when they worked from home compared to pre-pandemic levels when they were office-based. Dr Christoph Siemroth, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Essex who co-authored the research paper, said: “These people were working in complex jobs that required them to work in teams, as in a lot of professions, and the data showed that they took far more hours to get through the same amount of work when they were home-based.” One of the reasons, he said, was that workers spent much more time in meetings – held virtually, of course – because “something that might have been sorted out in 10 seconds by talking to someone in the office now involved setting up a Zoom call, which takes much longer”. And while employees spent more time in meetings with their peers, they spent less time in meetings with their managers, which equalled fewer opportunities for personal development. It reflects one of the constant themes of the WFH revolution during the pandemic; the difficulty in training new staff, who simply can’t learn the job when they are sitting on the end of a bed with a laptop. Crucially, the research was based on objective data which showed precisely how home workers were spending their time, as opposed to employee surveys that only ever provide a subjective view... waiting times for broadband customers to be connected to customer service workers have doubled since the pandemic struck... Ironically, but tellingly, the companies that make home working possible, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, are not so keen on the idea for their own staff. The reason is simple: people are less likely to have great ideas when they are sitting at home on their own... Sir James Dyson, whose business relies on creativity and innovation, believes Britain is heading for a two-tier workforce in which home workers will become “less and less effective”. Baroness Morrissey, the Conservative peer, has warned politicians that working from home will cause permanent damage to the economy. If they are right, there could soon be yet another divide in Britain: between companies that stick with traditional office-based working and succeed, and those that go down the hybrid route and fail."
Apple's head of machine learning quits after being made to come back to the office three days a week - "Ian Goodfellow, the director of machine learning, is believed to be the most senior employee to resign so far as a result of the plan. On April 11, the company began mandating one day a week in the office - a requirement that rose to two days on May 2. By May 23, all staff had to be at their desks three days a week. A survey of Apple workers from April 13-19 found 67 percent saying they were dissatisfied with the return-to-office policy... One Apple staffer speculated that Goodfellow's departure comes ahead of a potential announcement that the company will increase the in-person work requirement up to five days per week... The tech analyst is referred to as 'the father of general adversarial networks, or GANs,' according to the website 9to5Mac - pioneering technology which can be used generate fake media content... Apple and Google are the outliers [among big tech], with Google also demanding in March that workers had to come back into the office three days a week from April 4... 'We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely?' they write. 'How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?'"
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt on why people should return to the office - "“We spent decades having these conversations about people being close together ... the discussion at the coffee table and going to coffee,” Schmidt says. “Remember all of that? Was that all wrong?” Schmidt says it’s not just a matter of nostalgia: There are practicalities to working together in person. For example, he says that conversations about professionalism — which might be particularly necessary at companies full of young employees — are much harder to have virtually. When Schmidt started at Google, for example, the company had “an awful lot of college students who were behaving as though the workplace was like college,” he says. “And I used to say to them, ‘This is not college. This is a professional thing, you can’t do that. And, or, it might be illegal. So please stop, now.’” Younger employees, particularly those between the ages of 25 and 35, can also use in-office settings to more effectively develop their management styles, Schmidt says. For him, that includes learning about meeting etiquette, presentation skills, workplace politics and dealing with competitors, both internally and externally... There are exceptions, Schmidt notes: Some workers might have specialized roles that don’t require a lot of in-person communication, others might deeply dislike the office’s social nature and many probably aren’t looking forward to reintegrating lengthy commutes into their schedules. Still, Schmidt says, a largescale movement to permanently work remotely would deny at least 30 to 40 years of workplace experience. “I think there is a lot of evidence that humans are social,” he says. “And that the current virtual tools are not the same as the informal networks that occur within a corporation.”"
Workers Are Winning the Return-to-Office War Because They’re Right - Bloomberg - "The masks are coming off. Restaurants are filling up. International travel is resuming. But one thing is missing from this picture of returning normality: the rows of office workers bent over their desks. Just over two months ago, I wrote that returning to the office was the great class struggle of our time. I’m happy to report that, so far at least, the workers are winning. In the U.S., office occupancy rates seem to have flatlined at about 43% according to Kastle Systems, which collects figures on the number of workers who are working at their desks in America’s ten largest business districts by measuring key swipes... Across the Atlantic, London’s occupancy peaked at 42% last month. This is possibly just a wobble, with the long-term trend still upward. But it seems more likely that companies have gathered the low hanging fruit — the people who were raring to return after the anomie of the lockdown — and will henceforth have to deal with much more resistance. Even elite companies that have made a great fuss about getting their employees back to work such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley are struggling with a resistance army of about 30%. The longer the standoff continues, the more difficult it will be to change people’s habits. Employers are making more liberal use of carrots and sticks to overcome this resistance. Returning workers are greeted with drinks parties, swag bags, complimentary classes and lots of happy talk about how the office should be fun. Alphabet Inc.’s Google treated its staff to a concert by Lizzo. Microsoft Corp. throws parties with local musical talent. Qualcomm Inc. puts on fitness classes for workers in the office. It’s a wonder that anybody can get any work done. But there is an air of desperation about this... what are we to make of the technology start-up Clions, which has encouraged employees to move their desks to face the cherry blossoms to make work feel more like home? Hence the sticks. Many companies, including Google, have ordered their workers to turn up for a fixed period of time — most commonly three days a week. Some managers have taken to whispering that there will be a “Zoom ceiling” on workers who stay at home rather than pulling their weight in the office. And the British government has launched a campaign to get stay-at-home civil servants back to the office. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for government efficiency, has compiled a league table of departments by occupancy rates. (The Department for Education comes at the bottom with 25%. The average across the civil service is 44%.) Rees-Mogg has taken to leaving faux-polite notes on civil servants’ desks saying “sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.” Yet bullying is no more likely than bribery to be successful in today’s tight labor market. The only chance that employers have of winning the class struggle and restoring the ancient regime before the pandemic is if they band together to force employees back to the office. But absent such a grand capitalist conspiracy, employees will vote with their feet and clever employers will use flexibility as a recruitment tool. A series of employee surveys point to the same conclusion: Ipsos found that a third of employees would rather resign than return to the office fulltime; Korn Ferry found that 64% feared that returning to work would hurt their mental health; two-thirds of Google employees are unhappy about having to return to work three days a week. Employers report that potential new recruits are demanding flexible working as a condition of even thinking about taking a job. The back-to-the office ultras in the business community have been forced to compromise: JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive Jamie Dimon, for example, said in his latest letter to shareholders that half the bank’s staff will spend some or all of their time working from home in the future. At the same time, reformers who concluded that something fundamental has changed in the world of work are increasingly confident in their analysis. The accountancy and consulting giant Deloitte LLP has cut its office space in London by more than a third as the hybrid model becomes mainstream and some employees choose to work from home fulltime. There are many possible reasons why so many people are so reluctant to return to the good old ways: lingering worries about Covid; the darkening international situation; the rising cost of fuel; and the growing disorder of American cities, as crime rates soar, homeless camps proliferate and the mentally ill roam the subways. The Kastle figures show much higher occupancy rates in Austin and Dallas, the country’s leaders, than in New York and San Francisco, where commutes are longer and urban disorder worse. A Harris poll for USA Today found that 78% of employees were concerned about being able to afford gas for their commutes. But so far none of these explanations is completely convincing: In America, restaurant reservations and seat occupancy rates on airplanes have reached 90% of their pre-pandemic levels while Britain saw a mass exodus from the country at Easter. The real reason why people don’t want to go back to the office fulltime is that they don’t see the point. Most knowledge workers think that they can do their job just as well from home — and they can point to endless figures that show that they are right. Why endure the hassle of a commute if you can get that report written in the home office? The clash between workers and employers over returning to work is more than just a struggle over commuting and convenience, though it is certainly that. It is a clash over the meaning of work... When it comes to passing on the tricks of the trade, generating a sense of camaraderie or solving collective problems, there is nothing better than sharing the same space... Companies need to think hard about how to use new technology to reinforce social bonds and transmit corporate culture. How about “virtual co-working,” whereby colleagues who work at home either keep Zoom on all the time or collaborate over particular projects? (This author co-wrote a book with John Micklethwait over WhatsApp during lockdown.) Or virtual water coolers whereby colleagues drop in on each other at pre-arranged times? Or virtual coffee meetings whereby an algorithm arranges random meetings between colleagues? (The U.K. Treasury was using this device before Covid struck.) Above all, they need to reconceptualize offices as fundamentally social places — not where people go to do their old jobs interspersed with a bit of “fun,” but where they perform irreducibly collective tasks instead of feeding data to smart machines that don’t give a damn what desk they’re sitting on"
Business casual attire evolves to business comfort among hybrid workers - "With variants like Omicron making it tough for companies to set return-to-office dates, new fashion trends are emerging among hybrid workers, according to the 2022 Stitch Fix Style Forecast. These include a prolonged move toward comfortable attire — and there are no signs of a comeback for the beleaguered business suit... The report found clients ditching the business suit in droves, with about half of millennials saying they’ll never wear one again."
Who pays for the toilet paper? The big questions of the work-from-home era - "As the world convulses in crisis, and tens of millions of us dig in for the long haul of working from home, one question looms large: who pays for the tea and toilet paper? The answer, according to the Dutch, is your bosses. And how much? About two euros ($2.40) per working day, on average. That’s meant to cover not only coffee, tea and toilet paper used in work hours, but also the extra gas, electricity and water, plus the depreciation costs of a desk and a chair – all essentials that you’d never dream of paying for in the office. “We have literally calculated down to how many teaspoons there are in an average household, so from there it’s not that difficult to establish the costs,” said Gabrielle Bettonville of family finances institution NIBUD, which is mainly funded by the government and researched the extra costs of remote working."
'I miss remote work already': Workers are back in offices — and it's been very, very awkward - " As of April 11, an average of 43 per cent of workers had returned to offices across 10 of the United States’ top business centres, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and D.C., according to data monitored by Kastle Systems. In late December, during the Omicron surge, occupancy averaged just 17.5 per cent... Some workers are coming back to the same desks but no longer know their colleagues. Others are braving offices for the first time, having joined the workforce in the remote-everything era... “In my opinion, we’re actually seeing far greater struggles on the human side as people are trying to figure out exactly what the new routines are going to be and as organizations are struggling to adjust to people’s new beliefs about work,” Knight told The Washington Post. Being around other people feels draining. Swapping flexibility for anything mandatory seems like a downgrade. Old routines have become foreign and taxing: suiting up and commuting, making calls in front of co-workers, navigating run-ins with bosses in the restroom, picking a seat in the company kitchen. And the new stuff is weirder, like schlepping into work just to sit on Zoom calls in an empty office... Katherine has noticed a gap between her colleagues that graduated and started working remotely versus those “who knew what the real world was like.” She’s been trying to help out, offering advice about things she thought were common knowledge: Here’s what you should do with your hands during a meeting. Direct your attention to the person who’s presenting. Take notes, make eye contact. Don’t bring a snack. Don’t touch your phone... She’s seen some “insane” fashion choices from younger cohorts, too. Recently, a younger colleague came into the bank sporting a plaid suit like the one Cher wears in “Clueless” with white cowboy boots. Someone else wore their Balenciaga joggers on casual Friday. “What is this?” Katherine said. “There is no world in which this needs to be worn to the office.” Her own style has shifted to prioritize ease and efficiency; “everything needs to look good and be super comfortable.” She’s whittled her makeup routine down so it’s “snatched in five minutes.” She’s noticed the trend toward energy conservation more generally, not just in herself but in her colleagues. She suspects it’s because people are feeling more taxed by in-person interactions."
How employers can navigate the new hybrid workplace - The Globe and Mail - "People tend to be more satisfied when they have control over their work environment, she says, and remote workers save time and money on commuting. Still, there are downsides to remote work. Employees whose social life intersects with their work life, often early-career employees, aren’t going to get that working at home... “For some people, it’s simply lonely to work at home, particularly if you are on your own,” she says. And remote work also does seem to make it more difficult to work in teams. “Or at least we have to work harder doing that team-based work, work that requires high degrees of collaboration, brainstorming, bouncing off each other,” Dr. Black says. Some people are good at setting themselves up to work from home; others are not. “When the end of the day comes, they shut the door and they’re off the clock; they’re not working any more,” Dr. Black says. “For other people, that’s much harder. Sometimes they literally don’t have a door to shut, so it spills over. They ended up doing more hours of work.” In the longer term, some fear the impact on career progression, she says."
Goldman junior bankers are publicly threatening to leave Wall Street for tech as CEO demands full-time return to office - "“In GS, the top management says it’s employees choice but internally they track which team has most in office attendance”... Although not all workers are happy to go back into the office, for an industry like finance, and a bank like Goldman Sachs, it can be beneficial to have employees in the office. In a recent interview, David Solomon explained his logic of wanting workers to come back. “The secret sauce to our organization is, we attract thousands of really extraordinary young people who come to Goldman Sachs to learn to work, to create a network of other extraordinary people, and work very hard to serve our clients”... Goldman Sachs has an apprenticeship culture. More than 75% of the workforce are Millennials or Gen-Z, and people in the earlier stages of their career benefit from learning from senior leaders. This is crucial to career development and better relationships can be formed if done in person... On Blind, some bankers have shared they’ve started interviewing at other companies that offer more flexibility, like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Netflix, and Google."
'Bet your dog's missing you': Toronto office's return-to-work posters spark controversy - "A downtown Toronto building was forced to remove signage that was meant to welcome employees back to the office last week. Oxford Properties had placed signs in a building’s lobby, located at 20 Bay Street, "in an attempt to be lighthearted." One sign reads: "Seriously, we missed you," while another asks: "Miss your sweatpants yet?" A third sign reads: "Bet your dog's missing you.""
IBM Work-From-Home Policy Now a Thing of the Past - "A spokesperson for IBM says the company decided to require in-office work for its marketing teams in batches (as opposed to the other departments, which either started as co-located or gradually moved in that direction) because of the field's modern demands. "Marketing is no longer a 'waterfall' work process, where work is handed from one person to another," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "It is an iterative process, where the effects of changes in a campaign can be understood live, and responded to in real-time."... IBM's spokesperson cites internal research that has found "marketing teams that work in a co-located, agile environment are more effective and have better job satisfaction. In fact, there has been a very positive response to making this universal across marketing.""
Pre-covid
COVID-19 Pandemic Continues To Reshape Work in America - "60% of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time"
Remote Work Persisting and Trending Permanent - "54% of employees who work remotely at least some of the time say they would ideally like to split their time between working at home and in the office -- a hybrid arrangement. A little over a third (37%) would like to work from home exclusively, while 9% want to return to the office full time."
Someone cited the previous study to claim that most workers in the US didn't want to go back to the office ever. When I pointed out that "all or most of the time" was not the same as "all of the time" and dug up this disaggregated data, she got very upset and ragequit
US Remote Work Survey: PwC
I hear a lot of people claiming most workers don't want to return to the office at all, but in this survey, 8% don't want to work remotely, 10% want to work remotely 1-3 days a month, 10% want to work remotely 1 day a week, 19% want to work remotely 2 days a week, 16% want to work remotely 3 days a week, 10% want to work remotely 4 days a week and 29% want to work remotely 5 days a week (I'll assume that is full time). So 71% want to go back to the office at least once a week
Will Work-from-Home Work Forever? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Let’s take one profession that you’re intimately familiar with, which is college professor. Have you been teaching online during the pandemic?
DAVIS: I have. And I hate it.
DUBNER: Because why?
DAVIS: The students may not believe this, but when I teach, I try to figure out based on body language and the way that they look at me what’s making sense to them and what’s not. I just cannot figure out how to do that online. So, teaching remotely has been, for me, a terrible experience...
So, the teaching part of his job has suffered. But teaching isn’t the only thing an economics professor does.
DAVIS: We used to try to have remote seminars, and it was kind of a disaster. People would walk down the stairs or the dog would bark. Everyone now has learned how to have these remote seminars in my field.
DUBNER: Do you think you’ll ever return to those in-person seminars, at least anywhere near the same degree?
DAVIS: I don’t know. What I think about a lot now is If I’m invited, I could go to seminars anywhere around the world. And that has made me more productive. This is an excellent example of why working at home and working in the office are complementary for the same occupation...
Before the pandemic, Americans were commuting, on average, 54 minutes a day. Bloom and his coauthors found that people spent about 35 percent of that saved commuting time on their primary jobs, and about 60 percent on all non-leisure activity, including housework and childcare...
DAVIS: So, just for full transparency, we don’t observe productivity. We infer it. We infer that productivity of working at home was on average 50 percent of what productivity of working in the office is.
So that’s quite different from the higher productivity for those Chinese call-center jobs. When you measure across the entire work spectrum, Davis says:
DAVIS: Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always. So that would make you think, “Oh, then you always want to work 100 percent at the office.” But the nature of these goods is that they are complementary. So, on average, that’s true. But at the margin, that’s not true.
That’s a little confusing; let’s back up. The central argument here’s that the office creates certain benefits that your home can’t beat.
DAVIS: The real benefit to being at the office is face-to-face interaction — which might be painful if it’s your boss reprimanding you, but this concept of a knowledge spillover — all of that causes, we think, productivity to be higher at the office than at home. But we also think working at home is not as unproductive as it used to be. Because we have all of these tools at our disposal.
So Davis and his colleagues argue that productivity is substantially lower when people work from home, but — and this is a big “but” — work-from-home productivity has increased since the start of the pandemic. And not by just a little bit. They argue it has increased 46 percent relative to the productivity of working in the office.
DAVIS: Here’s the way to think about it. Whatever the productivity was in 2019, we’re better at working from home than we used to be.
This was only possible because of technologies that already existed."
Why Airlines, Cities, and Starbucks Need Remote Workers Back at the Office - "As companies in cities across the U.S. postpone and even scrap plans to reopen their offices, they have transformed once-teeming city business districts into commercial ghost towns comprised of essentially vacant skyscrapers and upscale complexes. A result has been the paralysis of the rarely remarked-upon business ecosystem centering on white-collar workers, who, when you include the enterprises reliant on them, account for a pre-pandemic labor force approaching 100 million workers... Meanwhile, in the air, white-collar workers previously kept a parallel economy buzzing, with business travel accounting for 60% to 70% of all airline revenue. While leisure getaways have also been obliterated, it turns out the bigger punch is the Zoomification of business meetings, a cancellation of business travel that analysts expect to persist for up to two or three years."
The Pandemic Workday Is 48 Minutes Longer and Has More Meetings - Bloomberg - "the workday lasted 48.5 minutes longer, the number of meetings increased about 13% and people sent an average of 1.4 more emails per day to their colleagues... Those additional meetings were shorter... Other analyses looking at VPN data found people were putting in three additional hours in the U.S. and logging in at odd hours. People who spoke to Bloomberg News attributed their harried schedules to child care demands, blurring boundaries between work and home, and the stresses of an economic recession"
Why People Like Working From Home - The Atlantic - "Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, one of the great “disruptors” of our age, deemed remote work “a pure negative” last fall. The 60-year-old Hastings is at the forefront of an existential crisis in the world of work, demanding that people return to the office despite not having an office himself. His criticism of remote work is that “not being able to get together in person” is bad... Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line."
The Big Read in short: Working remotely overseas not as simple as it seems - "some Singapore firms are looking at allowing their employees to work temporarily from overseas for up to six months... Factors such as taxation and labour laws mean that prolonging the period where one works remotely overseas for a Singapore firm will come with complications. Mr Chris Woo, tax leader of accountancy firm PwC Singapore, pointed out that one cannot expect to stay in a foreign country indefinitely without resident obligations, such as paying taxes and observance of labour laws, coming into play sooner or later. He added that this is why visitors to a certain country are generally allowed to be there only for a limited period of time and have to be issued work or employment passes, or visas if they wish to extend their stay... whenever a Singapore company has employees working in foreign countries, it “runs the risk of being liable for corporate income taxes in those countries by virtue of creating a ‘permanent establishment’ or taxable presence there”... Ms Charmaine Neo, the head of employment practice and investigations practice at WMH Law Corporation, gave the hypothetical example of a Singaporean employee employed by a Singapore company posted to work in the United Kingdom. “Your contract is under Singapore law… but if you work in the UK they may have different working hours, and even things like different minimum wage laws,” she said. “Even though your (employment) contract may be perfectly legal under Singapore law, the fact that you are working in the UK itself could also render you or your company to potential exposure to liabilities for laws in that country.”... The CPF Board website states that CPF contributions "are not payable on wages given to your employee who is employed to work overseas”... Experts cautioned that if left unchecked, this phenomenon could have repercussions for the Singapore workforce. Said Mr Teo from the Elitez Group of Companies: “If this becomes an increasing trend, then the stark reality for many Singaporeans, especially the young graduates, is that they must be aware that they are no longer competing with other local workforce members… They're competing on a global scale.”"
The dark side of working from home - " When all of your work is conducted virtually you end up inviting your managers into your home via Zoom. Your bosses may even make judgements about your lifestyle from what they see... This infiltration of work into our homes robs us of our private space, where we can switch off from work and relax how we please. It is difficult for anyone to wind down if they are constantly taking calls from work or if they know that they will have to return to work once they have put their kids to bed."
Opinion: In the move to remote work, we are losing our sense of connection to the workplace - The Globe and Mail - "As the pandemic drags on, many white-collar workers are realizing that those seemingly banal water-cooler chats in the office during pre-pandemic times were surprisingly important to their mental health. Sure, it ate up valuable time chatting about the latest Netflix series and commiserating about commuting, but it was also a glue that helped us connect with co-workers. The lack of office socializing and collaboration is contributing to the weakening of our work relationships and increasing employee stress. According to researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, lack of community is one of the root causes of burnout. “The area of community has to do with the ongoing relationships that employees have with other people on the job,” they wrote in a 2016 paper. “When these relationships are characterized by a lack of support and trust, and by unresolved conflict, then there is a greater risk of burnout. On the contrary, when these job‐related relationships are working well, there is a great deal of social support, employees have effective means of working out disagreements, and they are more likely to experience job engagement.” Spending time with people at work also tends to decrease loneliness. People who spent five or more hours with co-workers in the past week were 1.7 times less likely to be lonely, according to a joint study from the GenWell Project and the University of Victoria that analyzed loneliness during the pandemic... During the pandemic, our research team found that employees were finding it hard to stay connected to their peers while working remotely. Eighty-five per cent said their well-being has declined in the pandemic and around 40 per cent of respondents said they struggled with being so disconnected from co-workers... The ideal is a scenario where teams come in at the same time and are out of the office at the same time. That can mean three days in and two days out. It can be once a week or month – even a few times a year if teams work in different parts of the country or even the world. The point is that investing in consistently reconnecting and finding time together as a team is critical to combatting loneliness at work. Technology can then be used to augment – versus replace – existing relationships."
Bring back the commute and office attire. A growing sense of isolation and lack of belonging shifting feelings on remote work | The Star - "those who work exclusively from home say they feel more isolated than those who work on-site or do a mix of both. And almost 40 per cent of people who work at least part of the time from home say they do not feel a sense of belonging or acceptance at work or were unsure about it, up 12 percentage points since before the pandemic... 44 per cent of those who work exclusively from home said it became more difficult to maintain a sense of community with their colleagues, compared with 33 per cent who continued to go to a workplace... employees working from home get more done, but they also work longer hours... two thirds of respondents want to return to the office full time or at least part of the time."
What Meetings Will Look Like After the Pandemic - The Atlantic - "I believe we’ll also see an eventual reduction in the time spent in meetings. Meetings used to feel special because of the pomp and circumstance of physically gathering, but reducing them to a link has removed the mystique that pressured us to “take up all of the time.” In my own experiment of offering clients the opportunity to end a meeting when we are done talking, I’ve found that they’re elated—if we can get a call done in 10 minutes, that’s 20 to 50 minutes of their time that they’ve just gotten back, because our meeting culture has shifted from performance to pragmatism. All that being said, fully remote meetings can have downsides. Relying on a dozen or more different internet connections regularly leads to people inadvertently misjudging speaking cues (something you can gauge a little better in person), or missing parts of conversations, or having someone unexpectedly drop out at the worst moment. It can also be hard to tell whether you’ve actually engaged someone with your comments—for better or for worse—because everybody’s staring at separate parts of the screen. And by now most of us have taken to browsing other tabs while someone else is speaking, sort of half-listening with our cameras on (or off). It is indeed challenging to give a virtual speaker your undivided attention for more than a few minutes."
