Westlake Word

A decade ago, working from home effectively was unthinkable and there was seldom reason for it. Technology was not advanced enough; if coworkers needed to communicate, they would have to meet in person, call, or email. 

 

Now, everyone knows someone who works from home, and it is likely that they experienced it themself. It would be difficult to find someone under the age of 70 who has never heard of Zoom.

 

The advancement of technology paired with a global pandemic has created a monumental increase in people working from home. The modern workplace has transformed into something unrecognizable, changing the way people communicate, focus, and relax.

 

The rise in the at-home workforce has been increasing for years, even before the Coronavirus, as technology such as laptops, monitors, and communication devices like Skype and Zoom have advanced, becoming more portable and secure. 

 

When the world shut down in Spring 2020, the only option for many was to figure out how to work from home or lose their job. Now, with the world opening up again, it is very possible that, while most of the workforce will return to their offices, many will continue to work remotely. 

 

Aime Dempsey is a partner at Epstein Becker and Green, a civil law firm with a focus on employment and health insurance, and she has been working from home since March 16, 2020. 

 

While the firm had first planned to have their “hard reopening” in August, that date was then moved to January and now June. Epstein Becker and Green has kept its attorneys working from home as, according to Dempsey, lawyers are a “particularly sedentary thinking job.” Even occupations like office managers or receptionists are only going into the office about half of the time. 

 

The workplace has completely transformed for all kinds of jobs. Annie Karni, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, reports that “Many members of the White House staff have been working remotely because of strict coronavirus protocols instituted to reduce the number of people in the building with the president.”

 

According to Richard Eisenberg, a contributor to Forbes, “An early-April 2020 MIT survey of 25,000 American workers found that 34% of those who’d been employed four weeks earlier said they’re currently working from home. Combined with the roughly 15% who said they’d been working from home pre-COVID-19, that means nearly half the U.S. workforce might now be remote workers. And that’s also true, the researchers say, for workers 55 and older.”

 

Location means very little in a post-Covid world as “More than seven weeks after President Biden took office, White House staff members are working from California, Puerto Rico, Texas and elsewhere around the country, a striking indication of the strange reality of building a new administration during a pandemic,” Karni informs. 

 

According to Dempsey, she is not looking to returning to the office and when asked if there is anything she misses, she replied, “I don’t miss a whole lot.” 

 

Dempsey is not alone in these sentiments, as working from home has been proven to be beneficial in several ways. Eisenberg claims that “Working from home, research has found, can boost employee productivity, improve work/life balance and foster better mental health (not to mention reduce pollution from commuters).”

 

When she was thinking of returning to work, Dempsey responded that it would certainly be a while before she returned to the office on a regular basis and that “Now that work can be done so easily remotely, I probably won’t ever go in as much as I used to.”

 

While pretty much impossible for many occupations to continue working from home, it is very likely that the workforce will never fully return to what it once was. 

 

In this new age, with the technology that is available, why would anyone spend time commuting to a job they could just as easily perform in the comfort of their own home? 

 

Works Cited

 

Eisenberg, Richard, editor. "Is Working from Home the Future of Work?" Forbes, Next

Avenue, 10 Apr. 2020. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021. 

 

Karni, Annie. "When Your West Wing Job Is Really, Really Far from the Oval Office." The New

York Times, 11 Mar. 2021. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.