It has been roughly six weeks since half of Europe locked the office door and opened a laptop on the kitchen table. Overnight, millions of people who knew “remote work” only from articles about American startups became home workers. No preparation, no ergonomic chairs, often with the kids in the next room, because schools closed too.
For me the shift was smaller than for most. Since March 2018, when I moved to Limassol, I have been working with people in several countries without a shared office. I wrote about it when I explained how to lead a remote team and how I split my time between three countries. But choosing to work from home is one thing; having it imposed on you within a month, in the middle of a crisis, is something else entirely. So here is an honest assessment: what we gain, what we lose, and what questions we should be asking as a society.
What we gain
Let us start with the good news, because there is plenty of it.
- No commute. Anyone who has spent an hour stuck in Bucharest traffic knows what it means to get two hours a day back. That is not a small thing: it adds up to a full working day every week.
- Time with family. Many parents now see their kids at lunch, not just in the evening when everyone is exhausted. It is not always idyllic, but it is real.
- Talent from anywhere. If your team can work from home, you no longer have to hire within 30 kilometres of the office. A great developer in another city is as close as one down the street.
- Focus. For work that needs silence, the open-plan office is the enemy. At home, without the colleague who “has a quick question”, you can get done in three hours what used to take a day.
- Lower costs. Rent, utilities, coffee, parking. Many small companies are discovering that the office was one of their biggest fixed costs, and that part of it can go.
What we lose
Now for the part enthusiasts tend to skip. I have lived it, so this comes from experience, not theory.
Boundaries dissolve. When the office is in your living room, the working day never really ends. The laptop is always there, the phone buzzes at 10 p.m. and replying feels normal. I once wrote about how I learned to stop; at home, that lesson gets harder, not easier.
Loneliness. For people who live alone, lockdown plus remote work means whole days without talking to anyone except through a screen. That is not a comfort issue; it is a mental health issue.
Onboarding and culture. Someone with five years at the company will manage anywhere. Someone hired last week does not know whom to ask, cannot pick up the team’s tone and never sees how decisions actually get made. Company culture travels mostly through small things, and small things disappear on video.
Informal learning and serendipity. The best ideas do not always come from meetings. They come from the chat by the coffee machine, from overhearing how a colleague solves a problem. Scheduled calls leave no room for overhearing.
Video fatigue. Eight calls a day, with your own face in the corner of the screen, wear you out in a different way than eight face-to-face meetings. Within weeks Zoom became a household word, and with the popularity came the criticism: security problems and uninvited guests crashing meetings and online classes, already nicknamed “zoombombing”. The tools are adapting on the fly, just like the rest of us.
Not everyone has the same “home”
This is the part that worries me most. Working from home is comfortable if you have a separate room, good internet and a job that lives on a laptop. For a family of four in a two-bedroom flat, with online school and work calls running in parallel, “home” means chaos.
And there is a whole group of people for whom this debate does not even exist: cashiers, couriers, nurses, drivers, factory and construction workers. They cannot work from home, and they are the ones who have kept things running these past weeks. If the future of work becomes “remote”, we need to make sure we do not split society into those who stay safe behind a laptop and those who take the risks on their behalf.
Cities, offices and small towns
I do not know what the world will look like after this crisis, and I am wary of anyone who claims to know too precisely. But a few questions are worth asking now.
If some companies discover they can run with a smaller office, what happens to all the office buildings put up in recent years? If people no longer have to live near their job, will they keep paying high rents in big-city centres, or choose a house with a garden an hour away? Can small towns win back young people who left because there were no jobs there? And what happens to the cafes, restaurants and shops that lived off the lunchtime office crowd?
I have no certain answers. My guess is simply that we will not go back exactly to how things were in February, and we will not all stay home forever either. The truth will land somewhere in between, and it will look different from one industry to the next.
Advice for managers
- Measure results, not hours. If you need to see a green dot on the chat app to trust someone, remote work is not the problem.
- Write everything down: decisions, priorities, who does what by when. In the office you make up for gaps on the fly; remotely, what is not written down does not exist.
- Fewer meetings, shorter ones, each with a clear purpose. Not every conversation needs video.
- Make time for one-on-ones that are not about tasks. Ask simply: “How are you?” And listen to the answer.
- Be flexible with parents. Someone with kids at home can do excellent work, just maybe not between nine and five.
Advice for employees
- Set up a work corner, however small, and close it down in the evening. Rituals matter: when the laptop shuts, you have left the office.
- Keep a schedule with real breaks. Step out onto the balcony or go for a walk, as far as your local rules allow.
- Communicate more than feels necessary. Remotely, silence reads as a problem.
- Say so openly when you are running out of steam. Your manager cannot see your tired face in the corridor.
A change that will not fully reverse
In a few weeks this crisis ran an experiment no company would have dared to run in ten years. We learned that many things we said “cannot be done from home” can. We also learned that the office was not just a place with desks, but a place where people meet, learn from each other and feel part of something. I think the companies that come out of this period stronger will be the ones that take the best of both worlds instead of picking a side.
How are you living through these weeks? Have you found you work better from home, or are you counting the days until you are back at the office?