Good to know. DH does say that his team is struggling lately even though they were remote the whole time.

I kind of wonder if more people have long COVID than we know (or if not long COVID, at least weakened immunity post-COVID?).

Most people in my org are fully WFH and it still feels like everyone is “low energy, slow, unproductive, low morale, checked out, or out sick.” I think a lot of people (myself included) just never really recovered from 2020 burnout. And it’s been a rough winter illness-wise, especially for anyone with kids at home.

My role is very external facing, so I don’t need to collaborate constantly with my team, and my communication and collaboration needs are fully met by zoom meetings, emails, and teams messages. If I was in the office most of my time would still be spent going on site visits to connect with customers and meeting with customers via zoom, so there isn’t much point in making me drive in to the cubicle farm.

I have a couple different spots in the house where I like to work if I’m not in a meeting, and I have a dedicated office space for meetings and high focus times. I have a stay at home spouse and a toddler so it’s really nice to be able to be around them (and to escape to my home office when I need to be away).

I’m the one in my marriage with the big career, so in the before times I never thought that I’d be able to be this present in my kid’s life. Now that I’ve experienced WFH and found that I can still be highly effective in my role I’m not going back.

I also used to work for an organization that had a highly toxic “wE’rE A fAmiLy” culture (which meant we always stayed late and took on extra work) and a huge culture of valuing busy work, so I’m incredibly burnt out on the idea that my colleagues and I need to dedicate a lot of face time to building our team culture or whatever nonsense buzzwords are popular these days. I just want to do a good job and then log off and focus on my actual family.