By Lauren Allen

It has been a long year and a half working from home. Some of us may have enjoyed spending less time on commuting and more time with family, while others may have missed the day-to-day social interactions we experience when we enter an office. Like many of my friends did during the pandemic, I started a new role in December 2020 and was on-boarded completely virtually.

My new company did an excellent job of getting me set up and feeling welcomed from a virtual world, but I missed the excitement of interacting with new coworkers and participating in after work events. As things started to improve this summer I was going into the office once in a while for a sense of normalcy – although it was still pretty vacant.

We received our “return to office” date, which would have been last week – after the Labor Day holiday weekend. I started to get excited at the thought of actually getting to collaborate in person with the people I work with every single day virtually. Then we received a notice that our “return to office” had been pushed back a few months.

After speaking with my friends and colleagues in the industry it seems as though this is what most of their offices were doing as well to avoid any potential harm to their employees. It has been impressive to see how corporate America has assimilated so well to this model of work on a full time basis and how the hybrid model of working from home and working in the office will become a staple in most industries going forward.

A few notable changes I have seen in a considerable amount of companies nationwide is the offloading of rented office space, the increasing amount of technology that has been taken on by companies that may not have always been at the forefront of it and the flexibility in employee work schedules (taking into consideration at home obstacles such as family/work life balance).

This isn’t the most ideal option for me as I am very much a people person and enjoy the hustle and bustle of the office at least a couple days a week. For now, I will put back on my work [sweat]pants and will prepare for what will hopefully only be a couple more months of working remotely full time in my 8 by 10 room.