“Let’s go back.”
This is the unspoken desire of the nearly three-quarters of workers tired of toiling full time from home, per JLL research from October 2020. To be sure, many employees still crave flexibility in terms of occasionally plugging in from desks in their dens or basements. However, they’re overwhelmingly in favor of getting back to what they remember—at least in hybrid form.
Here’s the problem, though: It’s not going to be the same. It can’t be, even with COVID-19 vaccine timetables on the horizon. Rather, heading back will be fraught with new realities, responsibilities, and restrictions.
Of course, that isn’t to suggest that people can’t adapt. They can. In fact, a Drexel University study shows that creative problem-solving—as happened en masse at the start of the pandemic—pings a person’s mental reward centers. Nevertheless, most team members aren’t envisioning a replay of what happened last March and April as they adjusted to the…