This originally appeared on Forbes on June 9, 2021.
With vaccine rollouts going strong, companies are making return to the office plans. Google announced most employees would work three days a week. Apple has also made a similar plan, to which employees have pushed back on.
But returning to the office life as we once knew it—a commute followed by eight hours in an office, and then a commute home—is not as simple as flipping a policy change switch. When Covid-19 started, we had no choice but to grab our laptops and start working from home at speed. We adapted, driven by the novelty and a sense that everyone was in it together. But we can't just pull a seamless 180-degree turn back to the way it was before. We're out of practice, and the inclination isn't there when we've lived an alternate work reality for 18 months.