>a recent study found two-thirds of workers ‘craving’ more in-person time with their teams
[Note: study was conducted during a global pandemic in which casual social interaction outside of work was forbidden and/or lethally dangerous]
It's also funny that if you click the link to the actual Microsoft "study", it says "The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready?" in giant letters at the top of the page. The tone completely contradicts the article.
The whole premise is absurd - it wasn't an experiment, it was rational and reasonable response to a highly unusual situation, which by all accounts was extremely effective at keeping COVID infections minimal (at least, in places where it was done properly, in tandem with other public health measures).
And if it proved anything it's that most businesses had been unnecessarily skeptical about the ability of their workers to telecommute. There's no reason to think the logical outcome of all this is that we'd all want to move to working from home full-time, but there's every reason to believe a lot more people will take advantage of the flexible that doing so brings now that we know how feasible it is.
Worth noting that this is not an article but a clickbait opinion piece.
I think the reason people are unhappy in their home offices is not because they "crave" their cubicles or open-space abominations at work but because their homes are in many cases not equipped to be used as offices.
At the start of the pandemic, most people had to very quickly switch to WFH mode and improvise - neither their home setup (shoddy wifi, small laptop on a coffee table, no privacy) nor their company's tech stack (VPN, RDP/VDI, phone system/communications and file sharing) were properly designed to make working from home a pleasant and productive experience.
Even people and orgs who put a lot of effort into making WFH a productive experience were unable to in many cases (couldn't get a proper webcam except for black market prices, lead times for high-end mobile workstations are still at 2+ months, current wait here for engineers and technicians to set up fibre-optic connections are 6-8 months, compared to 3-4 weeks before the pandemic).
We all know that makeshift solutions tend to stay in place for the longest time once the immediate, worst pain has been alleviated and indeed from what I see, many organizations are still struggling and improvising on a daily basis (as are many schools, btw).
If the transition to home office was a 10 year "trend" instead of a shock from one day to the next, I think this would have gone a lot smoother, people would have planned a dedicated working space in their houses, got proper equipment and learned how to properly WFH over a period of time. (E.g. you can't expect someone who rented a tiny broom closet in a big city because he expected to be at home only for sleeping to suddenly be as productive as before now that they're locked into this space 22+ hours a day).
Yes, it's a mess: Many spouses and kids don't know how to deal with one person in a small apartment trying to get work done and I can absolutely see that some people are so exhausted that they crave a comparably quiet cubicle or put their health on the line to flee from the madness at home for at least a few hours a day. Hotels are even offering rooms for day use here to people who don't have a suitable home office.
But all that is not a fault with the concept of working from home in and of itself. Its benefits are undisputed and the only reason most companies want people back in the office is because it gives them more control over them.
It's the fault of the pandemic, bad planning, incompetent managerial and technical responses by companies and the fact that everybody had to struggle and improvise. This can all be remediated over the next few years if we are able to resist the propaganda - as alleged in the linked piece - that working from home is a total failure, inherently bad and must stop.
One of the outcomes that really surprised me is that computer manufactures still haven't really caught up - a lot of computer shops were inundated with orders for webcams, because their stand-alone monitors didn't have them built in. And guess what, they still don't (many shops here don't stock any monitors at all with built-in webcams, and many don't even have speakers). There's no reason any desktop computer these days shouldn't come basically standard with everything needed for teleconferencing - webcam, mic, speakers etc.
[Note: study was conducted during a global pandemic in which casual social interaction outside of work was forbidden and/or lethally dangerous]
It's also funny that if you click the link to the actual Microsoft "study", it says "The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready?" in giant letters at the top of the page. The tone completely contradicts the article.