As many of you know, I’ve been working from home since mid-March of 2020. It has been well over a year since I worked a day in the studio. In that time, I’ve only returned twice to the office: once in the summer of 2020 to pick up my personal items and once in the fall of 2020 to get my flu shot.
Depending on where you are in the world, some people have begun to or already have returned to work in an office environment. If you want to know something amusing, the original work from home order from my employer called for employees to work from for just two weeks. Obviously that order has been extended several times over the last fifteen months or so. The latest news I have heard is that, at least for my team, we will definitely spend the rest of 2021 working from home at a minimum.
There are already signs of what working back at the studio will look like, whenever that happens. Earlier this week, all employees of the Vancouver studio were informed that over the next few months of the summer, everyone is to pick a day to come back into the studio to pack up all their personal belongings and to clean up their desks. Last summer, there was a voluntary opportunity where employees who wanted to come pick up their stuff could. It was purely optional and it was solely for the benefits of the employees who may have been missing their coffee mugs, toys, and other collectibles.
This new mandate, however, is for the benefit of the studio itself. Management wants everyone to remove all their personal belongings and to clean up their desks because it needs to be flexible about who may or may not be at work on a particular day. It is most likely the concept of one permanent desk for every employee will be going away for most people.
I think it will take many months for management and facilities to setup the studio for employees to return. It will be a different environment, where many employees are only at the studio for part of the week.
Anyways, I have at least another six months of working from home still and I’m ok with that.