Working from home, or rather, “working” from home, is a simple pleasure. Nothing beats the adrenaline rush you get from waking up five minutes before your 10 a.m. meeting, or when you daringly trade a pantsuit for a pair of sweatpants for your morning stand-up video call. And sometimes, it’s amusing to attend meetings and only unmute yourself to add baseless commentary. Mhm. For sure. Let’s touch base soon on next steps. Circle back to me later in the day.
But here’s the thing about having too much of a good thing: it gets old real quick.
Working from home went from an occasional luxury to daily reality in a matter of weeks after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost all tech professionals traded high-tech equipment and office cubicles to something between a MacBook and their couch, to a home office with a triple monitor setup. Being cast so abruptly into a virtual work environment motivated large tech companies to find new, innovative ways to improve the efficiency of working from home. In fact, a study by Prodoscore shows that working from home caused a 47% increase in productivity since March. This massive surge in working from home has caused many large technology companies to rethink their current means of operation.
As someone who hopes to pursue a career in the technology industry, I’m eager to know: will working from home become a “new normal” post-pandemic? With the extra time on my hands, I’ve decided to tap into my oracular abilities. So here are a few of my predictions for what working in tech will look like in 2022.
In-person, with more work-from-home agility
As a newcomer to Zoom, I severely underestimated how much it was already being used in the workplace. Coupled with the massive surge in Zoom downloads since March 2020, it would be naive to bid farewell to Zoom in a post-pandemic world. The success of virtual work environments was so high that many Silicon Valley tech companies have opted to extend their work-from-home command for a few more months and maybe even forever. At the very least, tech companies have rethought the need for extensive office spaces and loosened restrictions on where their employees can live. We may see a large shift in office locations and have employees logging in from halfway across the country (or the world).
More virtual meetings
With this newfound agility in work environments, we lose the necessity for in-person work environments. In fact, it may even be easier for employees to meet on Zoom — they can exploit share screen, annotate, and control screen functionalities which are much harder to utilize in an in-person team meeting. One drawback of virtual meetings is the lack of private conversations done in a hushed whisper. We remove the element of having a casual exchange of ideas. But regardless, I have no doubt that Zoom will continue to improve its functionalities to further simulate a real-life conference room.
New work styles
The most complex transition from normal life to quarantine was trying to adapt work meant for an in-person environment to an online environment. Almost one year later, most companies have adapted to the virtual environment and extraordinarily streamlined their services. But what will the transition back to in-person environments look like, and will there even be a transition? In March 2020, tech companies adapted to virtual environments out of necessity, but the transition back to an in-person environment is far from necessary. Most tech companies have found a new comfort in their newly adapted work environments; short but more frequent meetings, collaborative work software, and unlimited bathroom breaks are just some of the few aspects of why virtual work trumps an in-person environment.
I’m thrilled to see that tech has once again met and exceeded expectations. But despite these technological advances in meeting and collaboration software, I’d prefer to stick to the classics. I want to meet my colleagues, take advantage of free coffee, form meaningful relationships with my managers and mentors, attend a company luncheon, learn from senior members of the team, give presentations on my findings, and strike up conversations by the water cooler. And while it’s amusing to occasionally take a backseat in meetings when working from home, I’d much rather be an active listener and contributor to the larger conversation (although, you can’t blame me for periodically adding this problem is a double-edged sword). If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that I’m a sucker for the “old normal.” I, like most young people in tech, am craving an in-person experience. But anyway, circle back to me in a few years. We’ll touch base and you’ll get to see if I predicted correctly.
Technically Speaking is an Opinion culture column used to discuss topics relating to technology, such as pop culture, trends, social media, or other relevant subject matter.
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