Opinion | Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.

Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.

They've been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they're not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can "hold" hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you're still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.

Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.