Back to the office, working from home — or both?

“Some people will love being in the office more when they get the chance. Others would still rather work from home,” says Cheryl Travers, a senior lecturer in organisational behaviour and human resource management at Loughborough University. “But many other people have learnt from this year that they sit somewhere in the middle.” The question is: how to make the new WFH hybrid work for you?

How do you know when it’s time to return?
There are some clear signs that you are craving the human interaction of the office. Snapping at everyone else in the house, feeling that you are submerging in a sea of work-related stress and visualising an escape to a mountain-top retreat are signs that you’ve been at home too long. “If you’re finding it hard to focus and your productivity levels have dropped, if you feel bored much of the day and unmotivated, you may well benefit from going back,” says Jennifer Wild, a consultant clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Oxford.

Treat it as an alarm signal if you are working in your pyjamas and can’t see the point of getting dressed into something more businesslike. “When working from home, and the interconnectedness of work and life outside of work has become so fused, and when you start to think of your home as a place of work rather than a place to enjoy your family and as a sanctuary, these are signs you need to think about returning to the workplace,” Travers says.

What if you have Foto (fear of the office)?
Maria Kordowicz, a senior lecturer in business psychology at the University of Lincoln, says that while being at home all the time can raise anxiety levels, so can the prospect of a sudden change in routine. “This is compounded by general fears surrounding the pandemic,” Kordowicz says.

Along with rising social anxiety after a year spent mostly indoors, this can give rise to Foto. It is likely to be common even among those who think they have missed the work environment. “I would imagine a lot of people have suffered from a lack of practice at how to talk with others and connect with others,” Travers says. “If you are feeling like you would rather not connect with people, would prefer Microsoft Teams conversations to seeing people face to face or are lacking confidence in your social skills, it’s probably time to face up to it and head back to the office.”

Start by reintroducing a strict routine
A big part of feeling overwhelmed with WFH has been the erosion of established routine. “Before the pandemic 40 per cent of our daily activities were predictive,” says Sabina Brennan, a neuroscientist who is an adjunct assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin and the author of Beating Brain Fog (Orion Spring). “Before 10am most days we would do things on autopilot — get dressed, brush teeth, have breakfast, head out at a certain time — which meant the frontal lobe part of our brains responsible for decision-making didn’t have to make much effort early on.”

Yet as our habitual behaviour became challenged our brains were overloaded and overwhelmed. “The more decisions our brain is forced to make, the more energy it uses up,” Brennan says. “With the changes to routine and sleep, working patterns and home schooling, our brains were bombarded and consequently fatigued.”

The solution, she says, is to reintroduce as many aspects of office routine as you can while still at home. “Establishing routines that can be automated will relieve pressure,” Brennan says. “Get back into old habits of waking up, dressing in work clothes, having breakfast and getting outside at precise times of the day.”

Are you an integrator or a segmenter?
You should pose this question when asking yourself whether a hybrid office week would work for you. Research suggests that most people fall into one of two camps: they are either segmenters, who like to avoid any overlap between work and home life, or integrators, who draw fewer emotional or physical boundaries between the two.

“An integrator will have thrived on the challenges of working from home; they are someone who doesn’t mind working while their baby naps or the kids are on a Zoom lesson,” Brennan says. “But if you are a segmenter you have probably struggled as you can’t cope with office life spilling into home routine and really need work to be out of the home.”

Even so, it may be unwise to dive straight back into a 9 to 5 working week if you have the option to transition more slowly. “My advice would be to experiment over a transition period,” Brennan says. “Given the opportunity, take your time to decide what suits best.”

Is a two-day office week the perfect compromise?
“Prior to the pandemic only about 5 per cent of people worked from home on a regular basis,” says Gemma Dale, a researcher at Liverpool John Moores University’s business school. Research by Alphawise, a research unit at Morgan Stanley, shows that UK workers want to spend an average of 2.4 days working from home when restrictions are lifted.

“On the face of things, having two or three days in the office a week would seem to fulfil the social and collaborative needs of work but also provide for that deeper work that is best done alone or independently,” Dale says. “But of course, this hybrid-style work is largely new, and only future research will tell us what really works in practice.” For some the change of environment will be enough to reboot creativity and motivation. “Some people will relish the fact that they are no longer at home all day every day and that will lead to renewed focus and energy, even on the days they WFH,” Kordowicz says.

Will extroverts adapt better than introverts?
According to personality theories, extroverts have higher levels of energy and sociability, thriving on interaction, while introverts don’t experience the same sort of mood boost and like being on their own. However, studies conducted during the past year suggest that introverts did not cope as well with lockdown as expected, with one 2020 study involving 484 university students finding that introverts became more stressed as the pandemic progressed while extroverts experienced a downturn in anxiety as the months went on.

“It now seems that we all sit somewhere on a spectrum of extroversion-introversion and are not clearly defined as one or the other, and the way we exhibit these traits depends on the context of a situation,” Kordowicz says. “My feeling is that after a year on our own we are all a bit more introverted, and it will take even those of us who were previously more extroverted a little more time to adapt to the change in social environments at work. So small steps.”

Get used to a fake commute
It may have been something you complained about relentlessly before Covid, but many now appreciate that the daily commute contributes more to a positive lifestyle balance — not to mention to our daily activity levels, even if it is just steps walked from train to the office — than previously thought.

“It provides a transition period, a defined barrier between work and home, which is absent when our home is our office,” Dale says. “At the moment many of us snap shut our laptops in the living room and even if that is the last time we look at our computers, there is no period of downtime before we switch to home life.”

It will take time to adapt to the journey into work, so Brennan recommends we start preparing, with a fake commute. “Create an artificial definition between work and home by going out for a walk at the start and end of the office working day,” she says. “The sooner you re-establish the commute the better prepared you’ll be once the call back to the office comes.”