The last few years have indeed been interesting with WFH experiments. Obviously different jobs and positions have various results… there’s no one size fits all answer. For company culture and collaboration, I tend to think positions allowing a hybrid schedule is the biggest win.
I love the idea and dream of having a job that I could literally jump on my car and work from anywhere… but in reality the remote work culture (in MY nimrod opinion) is another wedge between the haves and have nots of society. The “I’m sitting on a beach making cash” people are looked at very differently than the “I work in trades and have to show up at 8 everyday” people…and it’s simply a sad reality that it happens (I happen to be in the trades, and work in peoples homes while they treat us poorly for disrupting their utopia WFH home and lifestyle for a few days). We’re asked constantly to work around people’s “we’re going to go remote work in vacation wonderland for a week in July, can you make sure to do this project then” which is just a bizarre feeling if I’m honest.
All that said, I’m sure there’s jealousy in my opinion, but I do tend to think some form of hybrid work environment with schedule flexibility would be my utopia. One where I don’t need to beg borrow and beg more to leave 20 minutes early to make sure I can pickup my kids from school on occasion (yeah, try telling people working from home that you’re going to stop working on their kitchen remodel an hour early today to go to your child’s baseball game…they LOVE that…). But there’s reality in working that I get…there’s a privilege in many careers to have flexible lives that are easy to get accustomed to and it’s super easy to fall into the haves vs have nots mentality… I’m blessed with a good life currently even if it’s not perfect!
Because Visa alone PROFITED $32,000,000,000 in the last 12 months… that’s just Visa, not MasterCard, Discover, AmEx, etc. It’s nuts we hand so much cash to them and complain about prices increasing on everything.