The Ideal Work Location: The Office, WFH, Remote, or Hybrid?
I think most offices, at this point, have transitioned from their pandemic policies to whatever is next for the company policy — I know this can create a lot of flux! I'm curious: What is your ideal work location, if you could choose? What is your current work situation, and does it reflect your ideal?
Here are the questions:
- How has your company's policy changed, and do you think it's still in flux?
- Are you in the office all the time, or only some of the time?
- Do you still have your own office or cubicle, or are you hot-desking?
- If you're remote for some or all of the time, do you prefer to WFH — or somewhere else, like a coffee shop?
- (If you live with other people, how has their situation(s) affected yours?)
- What is your ideal work location, and are you seeking a new job because of it (seeking all remote work or all in-office work?)
I'd also wonder how seniority plays into this — I've seen a lot of chatter about how hard it is to teach new lawyers how to be lawyers remotely, for example.
As I noted back in early 2020, also, working from home doesn't necessarily mean working from your kitchen table. Some people prefer to go to coffee shops, libraries, or even hotel lobbies to get their work done. Having your own office, set up just for you, makes a huge difference also! Depending on your company policy, you could even become a digital nomad and live elsewhere in the country or world.
What is your ideal work location this year — office, WFH, remote, or hybrid?
Stock photo via Stencil.
Hybrid. In my case, 9 days in the office and maybe 1 day WFH. My mental health is better if I can talk to people in person and have separation from my work. I love that my org has much better tech to allow WFH when I need it. There are always a few others in my dept here as most are in at least a couple of days a week.
My office is currently hybrid (3 days per week in office with moderate flexibility) and it is perfect!
My ideal world is 2 days in, 3 days at home if I didn’t have a plane commute.
ours is 3 in office, 2 at home, but we have set days. i’m ok with this, but am lucky bc other departments in my organization are a full 5 days in. personally i love WFH and would be happier with 3 home and 2 in, or even 4 home and 1 in.
edited to add, that pre covid WFH was like unheard of at my work place and it is life changing. no longer have to go to the office when i don’t feel well (no separate sick days)
Same to all of this.
Hybrid, most days in, but office in walking distance of my house and daycare. I can dream, right?
I love being in the office and the folks I work with do too. We all have the ability to be flexible but most of choose to be in the office most of the time. I personally just can’t get work done at home. Meetings I can do, but that doesn’t tend to be most of my day.
I am remote and WFH, in a different time zone to the main office and all the other employees. I work on their time generally, but my hours are flexible. We bought our house making sure we had a room to be my office and I enjoy being able to adapt from day to day depending on how busy I am.
I have an infant and my husband is a stay at home parent. Its lovely to be able to take a break and visit with her for half an hour.
Hybrid – 1-2 days in the office. Currently stuck at 3 days in the office, and I’m not a fan. Sadly, my company doesn’t offer any flexibility.
I pretty much only come in when I have meetings. And by meetings, I mean external videocalls, because I almost never have in person meetings anymore. It’s usually twice a week. My team in my office varies wildly–one person is in 5 days a week, one pretty much never comes in, a couple of us are in 2 or 3 days, depending on the week. We traveled a lot before the pandemic, so worked a lot remotely even in the before times.
I should add that our official policy is 3 days in, but my group in my office is all partners, so… I imagine if we actually had an associate in our office, we might come in more (we do have associates on our team, just not in our office. This is part of the reason we handled remote work transition well–we were already used to working with people not in the same physical location as us)
Hybrid, 2x a week in the office, occasionally more. I like it.
Photo is this post is making me super nostalgic for Before Times. I think I have that dress (or something close to it) that I’d wear with nude-for-me heels on days I knew I’d be kicking ass and taking names. Le sigh. Dress and shoes are gathering dust in my closet these days.
My ideal is still in-office most days, and I try to get in 2-3 days a week … I’m a short commute away, so the travel isn’t a big deal. We’re 100% optional WFH so I’m often one of only a handful of folks in the office. I pack all my food since the cafeteria’s closed and the local lunch places have mostly gone out of business. It’d different, and not in a good way, but I’m not cut out to work from home so I’m glad to still have the option of an office.
I looked at that dress and thought it is so tight and thank goodness I don’t have to dress like that anymore!
I looked at how much of her arm and part of her back are exposed and thought how cold I’d be wearing that in my old overly air conditioned office!
I looked at the picture and thought it might be Kyrsten Sinema.
PnB wins the Internet!
Where’s the jean jacket?
I’m WFH permanently as I’m self-employed. But I still enjoy going to the occasional industry meeting or conference to get that face time. And part of my work involves meeting with clients. It’s enough for me.
If I didn’t have kids I think hybrid with 1-2 days per week in the office would be ideal. But with a young elementary age kid, I’m really enjoying fully remote work and being able to be home every day after school (and it’s also saving us some money on aftercare). My job is pretty flexible and not super intense and I can typically get my work done on a 9-3 schedule, but it would be much harder to get away with that if I were working in person.
I am a partner in a small law firm. We’ve been open continuously but I work from home more than in the office. Attorneys all have our own offices and that will not change. We are probably one of the few companies that expanded office space in 2020 and again in 2022. I like hybrid because I like options. I want to be able to have a real office and the opportunity to interact with my co-workers (we are a very collegial office, maybe to a fault if that is possible), but really enjoy the option to stay home to either just avoid time spent getting “coiffed” and commuting or to cloister myself away from distractions if I need to really focus. But the office offers equipment, human and physical resources, and space that I need at times, too.
Office.
No contest, do not enjoy WFH. Have my own office, ok view, great ergonomics and a collaborative and high focus job.
I prefer being in the office, too, but I appreciate the flexibility to WFH occasionally (waiting for deliveries, bad weather, etc). Policy at work is officially 3 days in-office with whispers that will change to 5 days, but I think people will walk.
Agree with flexibility, and I do have that and use it for deliveries and craftsmen, too.
I think I lump an occasional day like that in the office category rather than WFH because of the external, one-off nature.
Hybrid. Right now I’m 2 – 3 in the office, 2 – 3 from home, depending on meetings and weather. My team is committed to being in together on two specific days. At my previous job, which I had for six years, pre-COVID I was able to work from home one day per week. That was considered a major perk back then! Even that one day from home made a positive difference.
I was a technical writer for a long time. I saw lots of tech writers attempting to live the dream of working from home full time – especially with a move to a different state or country. After about two years, these arrangements would peter out due to the combination of a lack of face time and tech writers being the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for tech projects. It showed me the benefits of that certain amount of face time!
I loved the walking commutes that I occasionally had, and liked my Commuter Rail commutes (walking distance to the train).
But with a toddler, my permanent remote situation is the best.
I’ve been in hybrid working for the past 20 years and stayed at those jobs because of it even when higher salary or roles came my way. I’m now fully remote and super grateful. I have some medical issues that developed during the pandemic (cancer and surgery to remove part of my colon) and don’t know what I would do if I had to go back to in-office now that I need to use the bathroom urgently sometimes and don’t really want anyone else to know.Our household also hasn’t had Covid yet and husband is immune compromised, so super thankful for WfH for that as well. I also take my dog to early morning chemo visits every three weeks and couldn’t do that with my old commute, which was 1.5 hours each way into the city. I think I also have the ideal though–my own office upstairs while my husband works in his own office downstairs and lovely coworkers who are all remote as well (so no FOMO) and pretty much a group call or two a day with various members of our team and clients that keeps me pretty plugged in with everyone.
Old job was 3+ days in the office, but of your own choosing & those days were often spent on videocalls with people working from home or just not based at the same place. That was frustrating. During the height of the pandemic, we were all remote for 15 mos, (and optionally remote for 18 mos total) and I didn’t feel like the job/performance was negatively affected by people not being in one place.
New job is full remote, forever and always. Onboarding has been tough – not sure if it’s because the company is dysfunctional or because everyone’s fully remote, but it has been hard to connect with people and build relationships.
I think, in a perfect world, I’d do two days of meaningful in person time (like designated dates for meetings or being on-site with stakeholders) with a very short commute.
The best case scenario was when my whole team was WFH.
Now most people were brought back to the office. The WFH stragglers like me are a bit out of the loop except with other WFHers, and in general it feels like everyone is low energy, slow, unproductive, low morale, checked out, or out sick. I’m thinking I should look for a role where everyone will be WFH again.
Most people in my org are fully WFH and it still feels like everyone is “low energy, slow, unproductive, low morale, checked out, or out sick.” I think a lot of people (myself included) just never really recovered from 2020 burnout. And it’s been a rough winter illness-wise, especially for anyone with kids at home.
Good to know. DH does say that his team is struggling lately even though they were remote the whole time.
I kind of wonder if more people have long COVID than we know (or if not long COVID, at least weakened immunity post-COVID?).
We’re hybrid, 3 days in the office (2 of which are set days), 2 remote. If I had a better commute, I’d be ok with that schedule, but my commute is soul sucking. Ideal for me would be 2 days in office, 3 remote. I have a dedicated office at home and great set up, so I’m much more efficient when I’m home and don’t need to spend time driving, packing my lunch and getting “work ready”. I do appreciate some in person time as I have a collaborative role and I’m a social person.
Before the pandemic, 100% in office.
Now (no masks in my office, everyone meets in large groups in person), 100% WFH
In-house counsel.
My ideal is 100% WFH and I have that now. If they try to pull us back into the office I’ll find a new job and leave.
My role is very external facing, so I don’t need to collaborate constantly with my team, and my communication and collaboration needs are fully met by zoom meetings, emails, and teams messages. If I was in the office most of my time would still be spent going on site visits to connect with customers and meeting with customers via zoom, so there isn’t much point in making me drive in to the cubicle farm.
I have a couple different spots in the house where I like to work if I’m not in a meeting, and I have a dedicated office space for meetings and high focus times. I have a stay at home spouse and a toddler so it’s really nice to be able to be around them (and to escape to my home office when I need to be away).
I’m the one in my marriage with the big career, so in the before times I never thought that I’d be able to be this present in my kid’s life. Now that I’ve experienced WFH and found that I can still be highly effective in my role I’m not going back.
I also used to work for an organization that had a highly toxic “wE’rE A fAmiLy” culture (which meant we always stayed late and took on extra work) and a huge culture of valuing busy work, so I’m incredibly burnt out on the idea that my colleagues and I need to dedicate a lot of face time to building our team culture or whatever nonsense buzzwords are popular these days. I just want to do a good job and then log off and focus on my actual family.
I’ve been back in the office since they allowed us back in (but still encouraged WFH) in fall 2020. I hate WFH. I’m senior so I have some flexibility as far as hours and can WFH as needed and offer that same flexibility to my team (all attorneys). I’m low-key exploring new job opportunities but jobs that advertise as remote or mostly WFH are a hard pass for me.
I have clients in three states, so remote work takes 90% of my billable time. I love to go to clients’ locations because of the change of scenery and faces, and it’s an excuse to eat out.
Ideal: digital nomad. Since summer 2022, that is what I am doing. The agreement is that I go in-office for a week once every 2 months, only 6x’s / year. It’s great!