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Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
As an unsettling number of people have started ignoring public health guidance because they’re tired of restricting their behavior, employers too are increasingly relaxing their own practices even though the coronavirus continues to surge in many parts of the country. Employers are embracing the same magical thinking so many individuals are—we’re ready for it to be over, so we’ll just act as if it is—often at great expense to their workers.
Increasingly, employers are deciding to bring employees back to the office after several months of remote work. But they aren’t making those decisions based on any public health milestones; the moves appear to stem from plain old pandemic fatigue. Here’s an account that’s typical of a lot of the reports I’m receiving:
I work for a 500-person company that has had all but 10 employees working from home since mid-March. They have decided for reasons they have not shared that the office has to reopen this week. … Technically, we’re an essential business and they are legally okay to do this, but everything can be done remotely and it’s contrary to the local recommendations. Many of the workers will be forced to take public transportation. Other similar companies in the area have committed to letting their people telecommute at least until September and probably until 2021.
We have all made our concerns known, but somebody has a bee in their bonnet about letting people work from home. With 50 million unemployment claims, the company isn’t concerned about losing their workforce. … It’s very upsetting to everyone for the obvious health reasons, but also because the people we’ve worked for for many years can’t even be bothered to give us a reason for why they are willing to risk our lives.
To be fair, there can be legitimate reasons to want people back in the office. Some things are harder to do from home, or had to be put on hold entirely when teams went remote. And not every person or every job is well-suited for remote work, and that can show up in work quality and productivity. But what workers are rightly struggling with is: Why now? If conditions weren’t safe to return to the office a month ago, what has changed that makes them safer now?
In many cases, the answer seems to be little more than that the company’s management is sick of having to make…
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Read More: Office workers back in the office: Employers ignoring pandemic.
