This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. On college campuses across the United States, staff are back in the office. More specifically, they’re back in their own, individual offices, with their doors closed, meeting with one another over Zoom or Teams, battling low internet speeds, and reminding each other to mute themselves so that the sound of the meeting doesn’t create a deafening echo effect for everyone else.
I'm also an academic advisor, and my experience is a bit different from David Perry's. Most of my advisees prefer to meet over Zoom, but a significant minority of them schedule in-person appointments. I have eight student appointments scheduled for tomorrow, and three of them are in-person. There are some real advantages to in-person appointments: a lot of my students don't have a private space to be during Zoom meetings, and some of them don't have reliable wi-fi. I would prefer to be 100% remote right now, because the university refuses to follow basic safety precautions to prevent COVID transmission. But if they would mandate vaccines and let me require students to wear masks in my office, then I would prefer to give students the option of meeting face-to-face.
One interesting thing about going back to the office is that I've completely given up on dressing professionally. I'm wearing the same ratty jeans and slightly-nicer t-shirts that I would be wearing if I were working from home. Nobody has said anything, and if they don't like it, they're welcome to fire me. (They can't fire me. We're totally understaffed, because a bunch of my colleagues quit rather than come back to the plague-infested office.) I'm working for an institution that has basically told me to my face that they don't care whether I live or die, and I don't feel like I owe them adherence to arbitrary standards of professionalism. I'll go out of the way to do the things that matter to students, because they're entitled to good advising and none of this is their fault, but I don't think the students care what I wear.
Yup. We had to be back in the office (library) full time starting July 5, and are no longer allowed to work from home for any reason. 98% of the summer classes were fully online, including the class I was teaching, so I had to teach via zoom from my office where the walls don't go all the way to the ceiling, and all of my colleagues had to listen to me prattle on about The Odyssey for 2.5 hours a week.
The only people who came into the library, besides library staff, were the occasional faculty who were surprised we were there at all, and double surprised that we were still open 12 hours a day during the week.
I mind less being there now that all the students are back on campus (and 97% vaxxed), but required us there five days a week in the summer was pointless and infuriating. And the fact that we are no longer allowed to WFH at all is infantilizing and makes me want to quit, even though I genuinely love my job.
I strongly agree with most of what you have said about the waste of requiring people to be in offices. To your point about commutes and real estate I would add work clothing, which is expensive and uncomfortable, and work lunches, which are more expensive and less healthy than cooking for oneself at home.
However, I do think there is a small subset of jobs that need to be performed in person, and education is one of them. (Healthcare is another; there is a role for telemedicine, especially for occasional check-ins, but patients benefit from hands-on visits too.) We are a social species, and kids and young adults really do learn best from interacting face-to-face with other humans beings, by trying things out for themselves and getting feedback, and by discussing and bouncing ideas off each other, rather than by listening passively on Zoom with the camera turned off over a computer screen, which is, if we’re being honest, how most remote instruction has taken place over the past year.
The good news is that in-person instruction can be done safely, with a bit of planning. My daughter’s college (Carleton College in Minnesota) requires everyone to be vaccinated—and 99.4 percent of students and 99 percent of faculty and staff are vaccinated. In addition, they tested everyone upon arrival to campus and again a week later and were able to identify and isolate a tiny handful of infected people. They will continue surveillance testing throughout the year. The result is that the kids are having a totally normal year, with in-person classes and activities, parties and casual socializing, and just hanging out together. My daughter has been jamming on her guitar with other kids in her dorm, a prospect that was unimaginable a year ago.
By all means allow the administrators and office workers to stay home. But please let our kids have their in-person classes! After more than a year of being isolated at home, they really need it.
I work at an R1 institution and a lot of this rings really true for me, but I also feel really fortunate. My primary role is in student affairs, which has definitely embraced the idea of hybrid work and has been very open to flexibility, particularly for those of us who have jobs that aren’t primarily student-facing. The academic side of the house, however, is very much, “the students are here, and [more importantly] the faculty are here, so staff better be here.” I’m glad I don’t work in one of those areas.
In some ways it feels really good to be back in person — I’m far more productive at work and it’s really nice to be able to just walk down the hall and ask someone a question in person — but most of my meetings are still on zoom, so I definitely see the absurdity of asking ppl to come in only to do most of their work on zoom.
This hit home. I started a new job in a university on Friday and it is one of the few unis in the UK that is entirely face-to-face. I've got 150 students in a classroom built for 300 but apparently they all bunch together and we are all sceptical about the ventilation. But our departmental meetings are all online?
At least the students are wearing masks, English colleagues say maybe 10% are wearing masks in the classroom.
I’m staff, but non-student facing. One of the things our University is struggling with is equity, which, is a nice idea, but the world doesn’t work like that. My work is very thinky and can very easily be done from home (*much* better at home than in my cubicle, actually). Positions that interface with students or faculty obviously can’t WFH, or at least not every day. We need to trust people to know what works best for them, and to allow the conversation to be dictated by what works best for the unit, not what the old white dudes at the top of the organization prefer for outdated reasons.
I too share your — dare I say — hopefulness that maybe this moment affords us an opportunity to rethink the workplace — what it means, why it exists, and how it should function in the future. I think about my experience working with Business Improvement Districts and the anxiety around getting people back to offices so that commercial real estate doesn't tank, but offering no solutions to the legitimate gripes people have about heading back to the office — the senselessness, the lack of culture to feed off of in too many organizations, the commutes (I'm in LA). And I think of the notion in public placemaking circles around the 15-minute city where everything — schools, home, groceries, entertainment, public space — is all within a 15-minute TRANSIT ride. This moment could be the moment to reimagine that possibility and we could have healthier, better quality lives as a result. Anyway, I love, love, love this post and really pretty much everything you write and am excited to observe how things can be transformed — will be transformed — in this strange moment we find ourselves in. I will be at home working freelance until the permanent job has more to offer than management supervision in an adult daycare characterized by impersonal cubicle farms and lackluster accommodations. :-) Keep it coming!
I work for an institution which called us back to a 4-1 work week (four in office, 1 at home). We have to do our meetings on Zoom or we run into risk issues with too many people in a single room. I imagine this will impact our commute surveys that feed into clean air/pollution reduction ratings. I also am aware, though, that one thing missing from all of these discussions about colleges being back in-person is that most have a whole series of businesses tied to them through auxiliary and via real estate as both benefit from in-person. Not to mention the cities that collect sales tax on those auxiliary sales (snacks, lunches, etc., even hotel bed taxes for things like parents weekend). So this whole WFH thing is very much contested in ways that we are likely unaware. It's highly political. Empty office space means vendors in mixed use are not selling products and racking in sales tax or even helping property owners to pay property tax. It's highly political.
I appreciate the focus on the trappings of the office and how the status-signaling (if I can call it that?) relates to what places charge, whether it's a university or a law firm or a publisher ... made me think of how much people can get away with legally, or persuade others to give them, when their surroundings/clothing signal wealth and status. Even with our home offices, the background in a video call has become important. I'm lucky enough to be in a profession where whether or not I do a good job and meet deadlines is all that really matters (and I've worked from home for over 20 years, as do most of my colleagues), but I feel like it's a rare job where it's just about the work itself.
I'm interviewing internally for positions at an R1 university now and all of the hiring managers are like "Um, so, this position is fully on-site" or my personal favorite "unfortunately, um, this position is fully on-site", haha. It makes me want shout "Come on!"
I work in state government and this summer we went from no office work allowed unless it was something that was impossible to do at home to a mandatory minimum of three days in the office. Mondays and Fridays are not allowed to be work from home days (we have never been given a reason why so I can only assume it is to prevent people from taking off for the weekend early and working from a different location). Hardly anything is different about our work functions other than it is less safe because masks are optional. We all sit at our desks and join Teams meetings where we can literally hear each other speaking over the partitions. No one has individual offices, so we're actually all in the same very large room just with movable walls in between.
Behold, 112 comments and growing of people listing all of the STUFF they bring to make an office comfortable or bearable or even to just coordinate around the realities of commuting.
I rely on three separate bags (because nothing makes sense about my set-up).
FFS, let people work remotely unless it's really necessary y'all.
Just read this, in my downtown office. There are maybe 6 of us here today in around 10-15,000 square feet of office space. I’m mainly here for the bandwidth to download files since I’m on a Verizon card at home. We don’t collaborate here except to gossip/ have bitch sessions and with so few people here the building itself is freezing. It’s so wasteful but I’m lower middle management so, here I am.
Wow are you on the money. My company called everyone back in June. Even people who were part time remote (many 3 days/wk) before Covid were called back. They have done the bare minimum required for Covid (and in KS that's not saying much). Now they have a new rule that people can "work from home one day a week but not on a Monday or Friday". There have been outbreaks in the office, no transparency. The current executive team was all hired during Covid last year (did I mention they are all white men?) and they all live out of town. All through the pandemic they were flying in to meet in person with each other. They quietly got themselves vaccinated in January when only hospital workers and LTC residents were being vaccinated. They have decreed "we are not a remote company". Our customers are nursing homes and their residents - we NEVER have customers in the office. Literally never. Most of the jobs in the office are jobs where you are on the phone all day. We pay, mostly, at the bottom of the pay scale and our benefits are not great. Unsurprisingly, our turnover is astronomical. Yet our workers in the office are spending their days on the phone and on teams.
I'm very privileged in this little melodrama because I have an exceptionally unique skill and they can't afford to lose me so I still get to work from home except when they decide I should come in for "management meetings" (read: useless meetings with way to many people where we don't actually talk about issues). First one I went to in July was 20+ people, no masks, I ended up with a (thankfully non-Covid) fever for a week. I have no desire to stay I this environment.
That said, it's interesting to try and find companies who are getting it. I talk to lots of companies who say "we are 100% remote" but then they say oh, but we still think you will have to go back to traveling to client sites "when Covid is over". They can't comprehend a flexible schedule or heaven forbid 4 days a week or some other arrangement that creates better life balance. Most of the recruiting contacts I get say something I could translate as "we are chronically understaffed and you'll work 50-60 hrs a week but we have "unlimited PTO" so yay!".
So after all this, I am curious how we find the companies that are starting to get it.
So glad I found your Substack from the HBR article today! I adore that you do gift memberships for those that can't afford them too, what a great idea. I'm going to read up on your posts and pre-order that book!
I'm also an academic advisor, and my experience is a bit different from David Perry's. Most of my advisees prefer to meet over Zoom, but a significant minority of them schedule in-person appointments. I have eight student appointments scheduled for tomorrow, and three of them are in-person. There are some real advantages to in-person appointments: a lot of my students don't have a private space to be during Zoom meetings, and some of them don't have reliable wi-fi. I would prefer to be 100% remote right now, because the university refuses to follow basic safety precautions to prevent COVID transmission. But if they would mandate vaccines and let me require students to wear masks in my office, then I would prefer to give students the option of meeting face-to-face.
One interesting thing about going back to the office is that I've completely given up on dressing professionally. I'm wearing the same ratty jeans and slightly-nicer t-shirts that I would be wearing if I were working from home. Nobody has said anything, and if they don't like it, they're welcome to fire me. (They can't fire me. We're totally understaffed, because a bunch of my colleagues quit rather than come back to the plague-infested office.) I'm working for an institution that has basically told me to my face that they don't care whether I live or die, and I don't feel like I owe them adherence to arbitrary standards of professionalism. I'll go out of the way to do the things that matter to students, because they're entitled to good advising and none of this is their fault, but I don't think the students care what I wear.
PSA for Subscribers: My apologies that the promised "Instagram Just Trust Me" is gone — the original poster has removed it.
Yup. We had to be back in the office (library) full time starting July 5, and are no longer allowed to work from home for any reason. 98% of the summer classes were fully online, including the class I was teaching, so I had to teach via zoom from my office where the walls don't go all the way to the ceiling, and all of my colleagues had to listen to me prattle on about The Odyssey for 2.5 hours a week.
The only people who came into the library, besides library staff, were the occasional faculty who were surprised we were there at all, and double surprised that we were still open 12 hours a day during the week.
I mind less being there now that all the students are back on campus (and 97% vaxxed), but required us there five days a week in the summer was pointless and infuriating. And the fact that we are no longer allowed to WFH at all is infantilizing and makes me want to quit, even though I genuinely love my job.
I strongly agree with most of what you have said about the waste of requiring people to be in offices. To your point about commutes and real estate I would add work clothing, which is expensive and uncomfortable, and work lunches, which are more expensive and less healthy than cooking for oneself at home.
However, I do think there is a small subset of jobs that need to be performed in person, and education is one of them. (Healthcare is another; there is a role for telemedicine, especially for occasional check-ins, but patients benefit from hands-on visits too.) We are a social species, and kids and young adults really do learn best from interacting face-to-face with other humans beings, by trying things out for themselves and getting feedback, and by discussing and bouncing ideas off each other, rather than by listening passively on Zoom with the camera turned off over a computer screen, which is, if we’re being honest, how most remote instruction has taken place over the past year.
The good news is that in-person instruction can be done safely, with a bit of planning. My daughter’s college (Carleton College in Minnesota) requires everyone to be vaccinated—and 99.4 percent of students and 99 percent of faculty and staff are vaccinated. In addition, they tested everyone upon arrival to campus and again a week later and were able to identify and isolate a tiny handful of infected people. They will continue surveillance testing throughout the year. The result is that the kids are having a totally normal year, with in-person classes and activities, parties and casual socializing, and just hanging out together. My daughter has been jamming on her guitar with other kids in her dorm, a prospect that was unimaginable a year ago.
By all means allow the administrators and office workers to stay home. But please let our kids have their in-person classes! After more than a year of being isolated at home, they really need it.
I work at an R1 institution and a lot of this rings really true for me, but I also feel really fortunate. My primary role is in student affairs, which has definitely embraced the idea of hybrid work and has been very open to flexibility, particularly for those of us who have jobs that aren’t primarily student-facing. The academic side of the house, however, is very much, “the students are here, and [more importantly] the faculty are here, so staff better be here.” I’m glad I don’t work in one of those areas.
In some ways it feels really good to be back in person — I’m far more productive at work and it’s really nice to be able to just walk down the hall and ask someone a question in person — but most of my meetings are still on zoom, so I definitely see the absurdity of asking ppl to come in only to do most of their work on zoom.
This hit home. I started a new job in a university on Friday and it is one of the few unis in the UK that is entirely face-to-face. I've got 150 students in a classroom built for 300 but apparently they all bunch together and we are all sceptical about the ventilation. But our departmental meetings are all online?
At least the students are wearing masks, English colleagues say maybe 10% are wearing masks in the classroom.
I’m staff, but non-student facing. One of the things our University is struggling with is equity, which, is a nice idea, but the world doesn’t work like that. My work is very thinky and can very easily be done from home (*much* better at home than in my cubicle, actually). Positions that interface with students or faculty obviously can’t WFH, or at least not every day. We need to trust people to know what works best for them, and to allow the conversation to be dictated by what works best for the unit, not what the old white dudes at the top of the organization prefer for outdated reasons.
Side note: I can’t find the Discord info. Help?
I too share your — dare I say — hopefulness that maybe this moment affords us an opportunity to rethink the workplace — what it means, why it exists, and how it should function in the future. I think about my experience working with Business Improvement Districts and the anxiety around getting people back to offices so that commercial real estate doesn't tank, but offering no solutions to the legitimate gripes people have about heading back to the office — the senselessness, the lack of culture to feed off of in too many organizations, the commutes (I'm in LA). And I think of the notion in public placemaking circles around the 15-minute city where everything — schools, home, groceries, entertainment, public space — is all within a 15-minute TRANSIT ride. This moment could be the moment to reimagine that possibility and we could have healthier, better quality lives as a result. Anyway, I love, love, love this post and really pretty much everything you write and am excited to observe how things can be transformed — will be transformed — in this strange moment we find ourselves in. I will be at home working freelance until the permanent job has more to offer than management supervision in an adult daycare characterized by impersonal cubicle farms and lackluster accommodations. :-) Keep it coming!
I work for an institution which called us back to a 4-1 work week (four in office, 1 at home). We have to do our meetings on Zoom or we run into risk issues with too many people in a single room. I imagine this will impact our commute surveys that feed into clean air/pollution reduction ratings. I also am aware, though, that one thing missing from all of these discussions about colleges being back in-person is that most have a whole series of businesses tied to them through auxiliary and via real estate as both benefit from in-person. Not to mention the cities that collect sales tax on those auxiliary sales (snacks, lunches, etc., even hotel bed taxes for things like parents weekend). So this whole WFH thing is very much contested in ways that we are likely unaware. It's highly political. Empty office space means vendors in mixed use are not selling products and racking in sales tax or even helping property owners to pay property tax. It's highly political.
I appreciate the focus on the trappings of the office and how the status-signaling (if I can call it that?) relates to what places charge, whether it's a university or a law firm or a publisher ... made me think of how much people can get away with legally, or persuade others to give them, when their surroundings/clothing signal wealth and status. Even with our home offices, the background in a video call has become important. I'm lucky enough to be in a profession where whether or not I do a good job and meet deadlines is all that really matters (and I've worked from home for over 20 years, as do most of my colleagues), but I feel like it's a rare job where it's just about the work itself.
I'm interviewing internally for positions at an R1 university now and all of the hiring managers are like "Um, so, this position is fully on-site" or my personal favorite "unfortunately, um, this position is fully on-site", haha. It makes me want shout "Come on!"
I work in state government and this summer we went from no office work allowed unless it was something that was impossible to do at home to a mandatory minimum of three days in the office. Mondays and Fridays are not allowed to be work from home days (we have never been given a reason why so I can only assume it is to prevent people from taking off for the weekend early and working from a different location). Hardly anything is different about our work functions other than it is less safe because masks are optional. We all sit at our desks and join Teams meetings where we can literally hear each other speaking over the partitions. No one has individual offices, so we're actually all in the same very large room just with movable walls in between.
Ahaha... I *had* to come back to this thread and share a link to the blog AskAManager:
https://www.askamanager.org/2021/10/what-should-i-bring-to-the-office-now-that-were-going-back.html#comments.
Behold, 112 comments and growing of people listing all of the STUFF they bring to make an office comfortable or bearable or even to just coordinate around the realities of commuting.
I rely on three separate bags (because nothing makes sense about my set-up).
FFS, let people work remotely unless it's really necessary y'all.
Just read this, in my downtown office. There are maybe 6 of us here today in around 10-15,000 square feet of office space. I’m mainly here for the bandwidth to download files since I’m on a Verizon card at home. We don’t collaborate here except to gossip/ have bitch sessions and with so few people here the building itself is freezing. It’s so wasteful but I’m lower middle management so, here I am.
Wow are you on the money. My company called everyone back in June. Even people who were part time remote (many 3 days/wk) before Covid were called back. They have done the bare minimum required for Covid (and in KS that's not saying much). Now they have a new rule that people can "work from home one day a week but not on a Monday or Friday". There have been outbreaks in the office, no transparency. The current executive team was all hired during Covid last year (did I mention they are all white men?) and they all live out of town. All through the pandemic they were flying in to meet in person with each other. They quietly got themselves vaccinated in January when only hospital workers and LTC residents were being vaccinated. They have decreed "we are not a remote company". Our customers are nursing homes and their residents - we NEVER have customers in the office. Literally never. Most of the jobs in the office are jobs where you are on the phone all day. We pay, mostly, at the bottom of the pay scale and our benefits are not great. Unsurprisingly, our turnover is astronomical. Yet our workers in the office are spending their days on the phone and on teams.
I'm very privileged in this little melodrama because I have an exceptionally unique skill and they can't afford to lose me so I still get to work from home except when they decide I should come in for "management meetings" (read: useless meetings with way to many people where we don't actually talk about issues). First one I went to in July was 20+ people, no masks, I ended up with a (thankfully non-Covid) fever for a week. I have no desire to stay I this environment.
That said, it's interesting to try and find companies who are getting it. I talk to lots of companies who say "we are 100% remote" but then they say oh, but we still think you will have to go back to traveling to client sites "when Covid is over". They can't comprehend a flexible schedule or heaven forbid 4 days a week or some other arrangement that creates better life balance. Most of the recruiting contacts I get say something I could translate as "we are chronically understaffed and you'll work 50-60 hrs a week but we have "unlimited PTO" so yay!".
So after all this, I am curious how we find the companies that are starting to get it.
So glad I found your Substack from the HBR article today! I adore that you do gift memberships for those that can't afford them too, what a great idea. I'm going to read up on your posts and pre-order that book!
Could you post the Insta Just Trust Me link again? I could open from the email. Thanks!