The terms like isolation, pandemic, and social distancing have now become a puzzle for many. Working remotely from home has worked wonders for many people. Twelve months into a monumental shift to work-from-home culture, every management and business leader are more convinced about the collective productivity gains achieved, but some are no closer to giving up the culture of work from the office.

We have to scale the mixed thoughts behind the journey from office to home and vice-versa in terms of comfort, safety, and productivity. Will they return to the office both mentally and physically submissive towards the work?

It is now over a year or more since the countries across the globe, especially the developing countries, have been tussling with the covid pandemic. The Covid crisis has brought unprecedented human and humanitarian challenges to humankind. Many business organizations around the world have risen to the relevance of the occasion, acting wisely towards the direction, or swiftly to safeguard their employees and migrate to a new way of working models or virtual collaboration plans.

When the coronavirus pandemic began in many parts of the world, we were initially figuring out how to stay secure, how to stay safe at the home, and how this was going to affect our daily lives in the long run of the pandemic. Currently, we have better clarity to many of these tough questions based on the crisis, and also the new ones have surfaced. How can I stay fit and healthy while interacting with others in my personal and professional community? How can I stop the epidemic nature or massive spread of this covid disease? We have multiple things to celebrate and cheer. What should we do to celebrate? Simply, how can I live or involve in this new set of normal life?

Before the pandemic, the conventional wisdom on working practice had been that office were critical to productivity, nurture space for skills, culture development, and winning the war to attracting talent. During the epidemic time, many people have been surprised by how fast pace, quickly, and effective technologies for videoconferencing, digital interfaces, and other forms of digital collaboration were adopted in the workspaces. Generally, workplace culture and cultural diversity do not change at a fast pace or speedy. Rather it adjusts slowly with the pace, over a long period in response to an accumulation of multiple elements like small encouragements, motivational factors, and commitments.

Data speaks.

According to a McKinsey research study, eighty percentage (80%) of people questioned or those who attended the survey reported that they enjoy working from home. Forty-one percentage (41%) say that they are more confident and productive than they had been before in the office and twenty-eight percentage (28%) that they are as productive. Many sets of employees choose the comfort of work from home because of hectic travel plans, long commutes, and continuous travel schedules have found more productive ways to spend family time, enjoyed greater control, safety, security, time-bound collaboration, and flexibility in balancing the employee’s personal life and professional lives, and they completely decided that they prefer to work from home (remotely) rather than the regular office space work culture. This scenario raises certain serious thoughts on future office spaces, cabin-oriented work styles, and a productive work lifestyle.

On the other side, the research study of Deloitte suggests less than a third, i.e., thirty-two percentage (32%) of workers are highly likely to return to work when their office spaces reopen. Leading business organizations will boldly question long-held assumptions, loose ends on work protocols, or confusions about how work should be done in the long run and the role of the office. There is no one-size-fits-all solution or key for the questions. Big organizations, start-ups, SMEs, and corporations should also reflect on their critical observations based on regulations, values, protocols, and culture and on the interactions, practices, norms, and rituals that promote that particular culture.

The scope and nature of remote working may appear inexpensive and power-packed with big savings, but it can come with hidden costs to your culture, career development, or professional growth. Perhaps the boundaries between working prospects and not working become eroded in the mid-way of the pandemic. Homeworkers do not receive any sort of signals about when to switch off from regular works, which office workers do when they walk out or switch out from the regular shifts of their office building at the end of each working day. As organizations restructure and reconstruct how they work, collaborate, and identify what can be done and practice remotely, they can make effective decisions about which roles must be carried out in person, and to what point of degree.

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Stew Point.

In our viewpoint, every business leaders and the corporate managers have to work smart to restructure, redesign, reorganize, and rebuild their respective office spaces and create work processes to ensure safety, security, and compliance once workers return to the office. But is it possible to differentiate that the level of satisfaction, compliance, and productivity people experience working from their homes, or away from offices is the product of the social capital built up or evolved through countless hours of water-cooler conversations, coffee meetings, chit-chats, and social engagements before the onset of the pandemic?

Every organization could create workspaces that are specifically designed to support the kinds of engagements and interactions that cannot happen remotely or at the phase of the work from home. In the office of the future, advancement on technology will play a central role in creating more attention and enabling employees to return to office buildings and to work safely during the time of confusions. To maintain productivity, collaboration, engagement, and learning and to preserve the idea of corporate culture, the invisible boundaries between being physically present in the office and out of the office must collapse in the post-pandemic era of work. Develop better corporate structure and sharpen strong emotional intelligence, thrive on trust, enable better communication, and keep an eye on the future roadmap.

As employers and business leaders around the world experiment with possible ways of bringing their employees back to offices, the leadership management must act now to ensure or promise that when they return, workplaces are more advanced, productive, efficient, and safe.

Will they return?

Now is the right time for organizations and businesses to commit to earn and build on that trust. Maintaining, nurturing, and improving team culture should be a critical emphasis for every business during these changing times.