The “non-virtual” commute could sometimes be frustrating and stressful!
‘You can’t go back home again’ is often said. Now, you may not go back to the office either.
I was catching up on video chat with a friend and former colleague last week, who is the CEO of a nonprofit in western New York. Always a forward thinker, he is actively planning what his organization will look like post-covid. “We are not going back to the office,” he told me. Instead, they will transition to a ‘virtual first’ organization, giving up most their rented offices, retaining just a small space for the back office team and a space for folks to meet if they need to. Supervision will continue to take place over Zoom, and most meetings with clients are held outside the office anyway.
This change makes complete sense and, no doubt, many organizations would have gotten to this point eventually, but the Covid pandemic forced us into proof of concept perhaps decades faster than would have happened otherwise. Now with employees, and more importantly, bosses, being comfortable with work from home, it seems natural to move our workplaces at light speed into cyberspace when possible. And very often, it is possible.
In the early years of my working life, I was able to bicycle to work. It was a wonderful way to commute and even when I biked in the rain, the snow, or cold, it was satisfying. But from 1997-2014, my daily commute was a drive to the metro and a 45 minute train ride each way. Often there would be delays or traffic and my travel time could stretch to 90 minutes or more. A rough estimate is that I spent 8,500 hours commuting over those years. Easily a year of my life spent just going back and forth to work. I got a lot of reading done on the train, and a recent Washington Post article suggests that the commute itself may provide ‘transition time’ with valuable psychological benefits. Still it would have been such a relief if I could have worked from home one or two days a week.
The transformation to virtual organizations is inevitable and unstoppable and yet we should pause for a moment to remember that something will be lost when we are not together with our co-workers 40-50 hours a week.
When I think back on my years working in an office, what strikes me is the variety of the people I had a chance to know and become friends with at work. As has been noted many times in the last months, most of us live in a bubble of our own making. We go to school, marry, become friends, live in neighborhoods, and socialize with people who are much like us. We tend to associate with those who share our political views, our religion, and generally are in our socio-economic class. Most of the time they even ‘look like us’ a euphemism for ‘have a similar skin coloration.’ This certainly has been true for me.
Most of my most meaningful interactions and friendships with people who are ‘different’ has come at work. While in college, I worked in restaurants, bars, and fast food establishments. After college I worked in nonprofits. And I did a stint working at the Apple Store in our local shopping mall. In each of these workplaces, I met and often developed friendships with people of very different backgrounds. Not only am I (I believe) a better human being because of these friendships, I had a much richer, more fulfilling life because of the variety of people I met.
Working on the same floor with someone means that you see them every day. As such they become part of your life in a way that only members of your family do otherwise. If they don’t come to work, you notice. You wonder where they are. When they return, you inquire. It has been noted that we may spend more time with our co-workers than with our own families. We used to anyway.
Thinking back to the shared lunches, the indulgence of office gossip, even the awkward birthday celebrations (how fast can I finish my cake and get back to work without being rude?), it is still evident to me that, as I wrote in my poem ‘Orchid’, “geography is the better part of love.” We come to care about the people we see every day for no other reason than we are with them. When you see someone every day their humanity is on view in a way that will never be evident on a zoom call once a week or even at the monthly staff ‘outing.’
Maybe we will use the ‘extra’ time in our lives, the time spent not commuting, to better connect with our families or our neighbors. Or perhaps we will use it to do volunteer work which will bring us in contact with those beyond our small social sphere. But my fear is that it is more likely that the time will be used hunched over our devices viewing social media and consuming a ‘best version’ of our colleagues, associates, and friends. We may never know that they were crying in the bathroom this morning or that they lost a loved one last week, or that they are taking a painting class, the way we found out these things when we caught up in the lunch room or at the coffee machine. And yes, some of those work friendships lasted only as long as both were working in the same building. But a friendship need not last a lifetime to be enriching, even life-changing.
The ‘get your love at home’ set will no doubt see the virtual organization as only a plus. But a sentimental luddite like me, who is not embarrassed to admit that I cared deeply for some of my co-workers over the years, may pause and remember with twinge the loss of the serial friendships that the forsaken ‘office’ once made possible and that will be no more.