Remote work will have to become much more common in the future. It makes absolutely no sense to waste so much time and energy on commutes.
Personally I would look for another job.
I love being able to work from home, when I'm recovering from being ill or if it somehow makes life easier on a particular day. Will probably come in handy during this crisis as well - so I'm very thankful of it.
But 363 times out of 365 I much prefer to work in office. And that is with the assumption that I won't be alone...
Taking this into account, along with the undeniable time and energy benefits of remote work, I think companies should start preparing for, allowing and offering remote work. It should become normalized, so that people who want to work from home on some days should be able to.
Importantly though, I don't think it makes sense for most companies to try to completely switch to remote work. Eventually, I think this will lead to a stable equilibrium of some significant percentage of people working from home and a significant percentage coming to work, on a given day. Except for companies which deliberately want to be remote-only, I doubt it would ever result in no one coming to the office.
This seems like a win-win. It reduces the burden of commuting for those that do not want it or cannot manage it on a given day, it gives people more free time, it lessens energy expenditure, but there's still an office to come to and socialize, interact directly and do immediate in-person business, just with a bit less people than usual.
Like talking to a room where people are actually present and to 20 people each from their laptop, with the mic muted and the video turned off
It's much harder to 'read the room' and much is lost
And I certainly love working from home and don't fancy socializing much when at work
But technology made a lot of work-related things harder or worse
In fact, things like making the room easier to read despite using a camera is exactly what I was talking about. It is definitely the case with today's systems where you simply have a camera on the lid of the laptop and display many individual images of people on the screen. This does look very unnatural.
For instance, one very distracting aspect of this is that it is impossible for two people to be looking into each other's eyes as they are communicating, since the image and the camera are not aligned. Solving this would at least make addressing a single person over a video call much more natural. Perhaps we could somehow place a camera behind the screen? Will volumetric display technology make it easier once it is more widespread?
And this is just one problem that we can identify. I'm sure there are many other subtle cues missing from a video call which could be identified and then hopefully fixed.
The funniest example I know is a guy who will first call people then when they say NO in no uncertain terms and hang up on him he drives there and asks exactly the same thing. He frequently describes how both him and the prospect pretend the rude phone call never happened.
He one time needed 100 plants for a stage of a theater performance. On the phone the grower refused to rent them to him, he didn't want to name a price, just NO. In person he immediately agreed to do it for free.
