Time.news – If the digital society has not yet freed us from work, as was ambition, however, the pandemic has at least released us from being present in its designated places: smart working has taken us away from the offices and led us to work at home, as if we had suddenly become all freelancers with a home studio. As happens more often to lawyers, architects, accountants, some engineers, graphic designers, psychologists, writers. With the result that many, anticipating the advantage and convenience of teleworking, now that the pandemic emergency is over, they don’t want to go back to the office. “Remote working has brought a truce,” noted the New York Times in a report on the subject.
In the sense that in just two years of pandemic emergency that have upset our habits, the experiment of smart working has meant that 50 million people have made themselves available “to change the way” in which they have worked so far. A radical revolution, which led to the discovery that “the office, in other words, has never been a one size fits all” but a size that could also create many annoyances towards a certain environment characterized by collective gossip, jokes, jokes and certain collective rites that “for many have amplified the feeling of strangeness”. Offices as places of great suffering rather than redemption and well-being.
There is a theory, in fact, according to which workplaces are nothing more than “centers of power” in which every day one slips in to play one’s part in a collective “role play” with a “control tic” “Attached and connected. The office manager who does not give respite and who always whips everyone, the meetings in which we sneak up on each other to see how to take sides and what position to take, and where plots are consumed, between alliances, sympathies, enmities, rivalries, envy, certainly also many encounters but also as many clashes. With promotions, careers, steps forward and those who always remain at the stake and no one knows why they fail to make it, perhaps because they are victims of prejudices or dislikes. Places where you go, but more often with a certain heartache.
The NYTimes calculates that “the last two years have ushered in an unplanned experiment with a different way of working: about 50 million Americans have left their offices. Before the pandemic in 2019, around 4% of US employees worked exclusively from home; by May 2020, that figure had risen to 43%, according to Gallup. Of course, this means that the majority of the workforce has continued to work in person for the past two years. But among white-collar workers before Covid only 6% worked exclusively from home, while in May 2020 it rose to 65% “and that previously” the only thing that hindered flexible working arrangements was the failure of the imagination ”, To prefigure other paths and organizational methods. However, a “failure that was remedied in just three weeks in March 2020” in the midst of infections from Covid-19. We immediately adapted to teleworking.
Thus, once the pandemic emergency ended, the theme of returning to the office was brought up again, it was also discovered that “there were a myriad of reasons why people preferred working from home, in addition to worries about Covid safety “such as, for example, being able to enjoy” the sunlight “, wearing” sweatpants, the quality of time with children or cats, more hours to read and run, space for hide the anguish of a poor day or year “even if the most argued justification concerned precisely” the culture of the workplace “, enclosed in this observation:” It doesn’t make much sense to go back to the office if we are only going back to the old people’s club guys, ”said Keren Gifford, 37, an information technology worker in Pittsburgh, who has not yet been asked to return to her office. “What a relief not to have to go day after day, week after week, and not be able to make friends and have fun.” So many, like Ms. Gifford, “have realized that they feel like they have spent their careers in spaces built for somebody else”.
The main American newspaper notes: “Some of the companies now attempting to recall their staff are facing a wave of resistance from workersencouraged to question how things have always been, that is, difficult for many people ”.
The results of these claims are contained in some studies on a ceiling of 10,000 employees, which state that “women and people of color were more likely to see remote work as beneficial than their white male colleagues.”
In the United States, for example, “86% of Hispanics and 81% of black knowledge workers, those who do non-manual work, said they preferred hybrid or remote work, compared to 75% of workers in the acquaintance whites. And globally, 50% of working mothers who participated in the studies reported wanting to work remotely for most or all of the time, compared to 43% of fathers. Since May 2021, the sense of belonging to work has increased for 24% of black knowledge workers interviewed, compared to 5% of white knowledge workers ”.
Of course, then there are also the controversial aspects of “working from home”. Like the episode told by Barbara Harris, 49, who works in professional services in Virginia: My husband sometimes comes home and turns on the TV and I point out: but how, you turned on the TV in my office !? ” Or, again, the one narrated by Dave Marques, 24, a student and freelance writer: “I feel a bit depressed when I wake up at 8 in the morning and go to my coffee table, sit in front of the computer and stay on Zoom from 9 to 17 and in the end I close the computer without ever leaving my small studio all day “. Apart from the few controversial cases, “managers pushing for a comeback are faced with those employees attached to their newfound sense of well-being“, The New York Times says, and” employers can hear the grumbles of frustration. “
The surprising thing is that in the 1950s the first advanced studies in the sociology of work foreshadowed the telematic and teleworking society as the Eden of the future and of freedom, but now that we have been able to experience Eden for almost two years and we have it at hand, there are those who stand in the way and re-propose the old organization of work ”. For what nostalgia?