[tallanvor]

The problem is that your idea of freedom is somebody else's idea of torture. I don't mind working from home once or twice a week, but being forced to work from home 5 days a week was awful and both my mental and physical health suffered significantly.

For me being able to go to the office is freedom - unless I need to have my laptop for an evening meeting, I can leave it in the office and not have to think about work problems when I'm not there. The 25 minute walk in the morning starts to get me into the office mindset, and the walk home helps me leave the work problems behind.

Economically it's also better for me to go to the office. Lunches are subsidized, so I'd be very hard pressed to eat cheaper at home without having to eat the same thing every day, and in the office I don't have to pay for my beverages. Utilities are also something that I save money on by going to the office.

I saw many colleagues start during the WFH period that are still way behind in terms of where they would have been if they had been in the office, surrounded by others who can help them easily. --No matter how much we tell them to ping us, or how much we try to be proactive and reach out to them, it's simply much harder to learn remotely.

I'm not saying that everyone needs to be in the office 5 days a week, but pretending that there are no benefits to going to the office is just as disingenuous as pretending that there are no benefits to letting people work from home.

[strikelaserclaw]

Remote work is all about choice and personal freedom, if you want to go into the office, you should do that but the problem arises where you are in the office and you feel lonely (due to your choice) and you start a crusade to get everyone back in the office.

[tallanvor]

Personal freedom is great, but you're still a member of society, which means you have to compromise. That may very well mean accepting that you do need to go into the office sometimes in order to help ensure that your coworkers' needs are also being met.

[danaris]

If you're talking about needs for work, then that's reasonable to ask, once in a while. As long as it's genuine needs and not just preferences.

But if you're asking your coworkers to regularly come in to work to meet your social needs? No. That's your responsibility. If you can't meet those needs at work, then you need to find other avenues outside of work to meet them, or find a different job where more of the people have the same expectations as you regarding the social nature of work.

You are also a member of society, and need to help ensure that your coworkers' needs are being met. You don't get to demand that they all sacrifice time, money, greenhouse gases, and mental energy just to help you feel like it's still 2019.

[Volundr]

> But if you're asking your coworkers to regularly come in to work to meet your social needs? No. That's your responsibility.

This. Your coworkers are not your friends. If your coworkers are all that's filling your social needs that should be a red flag for you and something you should work on.

[kiawe_fire]

That sounds very one sided.

The compromise (as the poster to whom you replied mentioned) should be “as members of society, we should occasionally compromise our needs to help meet the needs of people who prefer a more social office atmosphere, perhaps once or twice a week”, should it not?

Why should one type of member of society always be inconvenienced so that the other side never is?

[ghaff]

There are lots of perfectly legitimate things that people do which inconvenience me in various ways. But I don't think I'm within my rights to demand that airlines don't allow young children or obese people in planes for example. If management doesn't feel I have a need to come into the office a couple days a week, I'm not coming in just because some people want the buzz of a busy 2019 office.

And if that makes me selfish, so be it.

[danaris]

Well, for one thing, that means that even if you're working remotely, you still need to be physically located in close proximity to the office. It takes full-remote, with all the fairly obvious benefits it offers, off the table.

For another, it's one person asking many people to sacrifice their own needs to meet his.

For a third, he's presenting it as if having all his coworkers, or at least most of them, in the office is the only reasonable way to meet his social needs, when there are certainly other options.

Overall, what it sounds very much like is "Everything was going just fine for me before the pandemic, and then when other people started finding ways to meet their needs better, and the "default" changed, suddenly I was no longer automatically getting my needs met. The obvious solution to this is that we just need to go back to everyone else giving up what they've gained so I don't have to change my lifestyle in any way!"

If that's not what tallanvor means, then I apologize for misconstruing them; however, I have definitely seen many, many people who clearly feel that way advocating for full return-to-office policies specifically for their own comfort and convenience.

[ryandrake]

I would be totally OK with doing this if those people who want a more social office atmosphere would be willing to pool together and pay for the gasoline I would have to use to commute 2-3 hours each way to the office. If it cost them real money, would they be willing to pay for those "magical hallway conversations" and "office buzz"?

[ghaff]

If those needs are professional, possibly. As someone who has been largely remote for a long time, I'll fly in or do a long drive for an occasional multi-day team get-together.

But, if it's just a case of wanting me in the office semi-regularly so you have people around, I won't be meeting those needs. (But I'm sure there are plenty of other companies where offices are more back to pre-pandemic ways. And someone who cares deeply about that should probably seek out such companies.)