The New Normal
About a week ago, I packed up everything from my office at Cornell University and brought it home. No, I didn't retire or quit or anything like that. After fifteen months of pandemic, working at home has became the new normal. Leadership decided that our department along with several others will pioneer a new hybrid workplace. Most of the IT staff will work at home and our building will be remodeled as meeting rooms, teamwork spaces, and Zoom rooms. It will be more like a conference center than a traditional office building.
How do I feel about that? I've actually enjoyed working at home. I've been more productive and have had fewer interruptions. My team has made more of an effort to actively communicate to make up for the lack of proximity, which has been a bonus. Plus, I don't have to drive a half-hour each way. There's an automatic extra hour of time in the day for anything I want. Not to mention that there's always a cat on my desk, watching me type and waiting for an opportunity to steal my pencil (again).
In a survey, at least three-quarters of my colleagues were happy working at least four days per week at home. A few wanted two or three days in the office, saying they wanted more face-to-face contact, but they were in the minority. Maybe introverts outnumber the extroverts in IT.
I've always been as interested in the trends that science fiction missed as the ones that were predicted. For instance, stories in the seventies and eighties wrote about bigger, faster, and more elaborate fax machines. Most writers completely missed the shift to email for communication. Likewise, most stories about pandemics focused on the medical aspects, the labor shortages, or the quarantines. I don't recall any stories that predicted the shifts to remote work, video conferencing, and distributed workplaces that are occurring today. It will be interesting to see if it continues now that the norms have been broken or if most businesses go back to their previous expectations.
I know my cats approve of the new normal.