As the world is slowly going back to normal, many offices have started to bring their employees back to workplaces. However, such a comeback turned out to be a challenging and dreadful change for many current remote workers. Of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, the forceful transition to remote work caught everyone by surprise. Not many were ready for it or knew how to handle such a shift. Yet, as time has passed, people have found working from home a rather satisfying experience.
So, now, most remote workers find it challenging to return to the office environment full time. Almost two years of remote work from home helped people realize its benefits. Now people are sceptical and resentful about going back to how things were. Let’s see some of the biggest challenges people may face in the office after being employed remotely.
Table of Contents
Not feeling in charge of your own time/decisions
Remote work comes with lots of benefits. One of which is the freedom to make all kinds of choices for yourself. Hence, people have to decide what to wear when working, where in the house to work from, when to take breaks, etc. Overall, depending on the nature of the job, people had the power to become their own bosses when working from home. They still had to deliver the results. Yet, employees could decide on the terms and conditions of their working hours, environment, etc.
Independence and self-reliance became the inevitable advantages of working from home. However, office environments don’t typically guarantee similar benefits. It may surprise some companies, but most people don’t like being watched, monitored, or forced to report all the time. In addition, a sense of independence is not easy to push aside, even for work purposes. Thus, many former remote workers struggle with being back in the office where they don’t have the freedoms they used to enjoy at home.
Lastly, such a shift can also be hard for offices’ managerial staff. Now, as we all learned how autonomous and productive remote employees can be, managers’ roles (and necessity) look questionable. Hence, sensing the decrease of your own professional value can also negatively impact one’s performance or even mental health. To learn more about the relationship between self-worth and professional achievements, check out this essay writing help service and order a paper on the topic.
Being away from your loved ones
Many people have found working from home rather rewarding. The main reason for it was the ability to be with their families 24/7. Of course, not everyone found it easy to work from home while also taking care of children at home. Yet, when conditions allowed it, work from home meant more time with families, partners, children, and even pets. For many, such a time together was a refreshing change. Overall, we tend to give away our most productive hours to work. As a result, when working in the office, we spend more time with colleagues, or even by ourselves, than with the people we care about the most.
Now, returning to the office means being away from your loved ones again. Not many people are happy about it. In fact, some office employees develop depression, separation anxiety, and other mental disorders due to the need to be away for so long. Overall, the majority of office workers find spending most of their daytime outside homes and families rather challenging. However, some people experience anxiety by simply being away from home, even if they live alone. Our homes give us the sense of peace and belonging which office can hardly replace.
Commuting
Needless to say, there is barely anyone thrilled about the need to commute to work once again. Often, commuting is one of the hardest and most stressful parts of working in the office. Why should everyone spend a big chunk of personal time commuting to work every day when it doesn’t seem all that necessary now? Commuting has always been a major factor in where people were willing to accept a job in the first place. However, now it has turned into the biggest obstacle in returning to office work at all.
Change on its own
Last but not least, people are generally not good with changes. Dealing with any type of change, positive or negative, can be quite a challenge on its own. Hence, even people who were happy to return to the office environment find themselves struggling to adjust. It’s a normal thing to experience in the first few weeks in the office.
Back at home, you already had everything figured out. You knew when to wake, how to start your day, and how to navigate the whole home working experience. Yet, being back in the office throws off your entire settings. Everything from scheduling to planning now requires, yet again, new arrangements that take time and energy. That is why, in the majority, people are not so ecstatic about another big change in less than two years.
