Skip to main content

Work Day

In my workplace, folks who live near one of our offices are coming in quite often not sure how many times a week but definitely more than once. That in turn is creating a new kind of disaffection among those who are further afield - they don't feel connected to the mainstream of events, the live water cooler conversations, the in-person meetings with clients who live in the same city and so on.

 I don't hear a clamor among my colleagues to come to work more often. It's just that there is a disparity between those who have the opportunity and avail it and those who don't specially because its not an option. The playing field has become uneven now and folks are choosing their own adventure. Without central cohesion, people are more on their own, taking charge of their destiny as they see it. 

“Even with most firms implementing a ‘three days in the office hybrid policy,’ most employees prefer visiting the office just once a week,” Eldar Gizzatov, Basking.io’s chief executive officer, wrote in the report. “The pandemic has accustomed people to work remotely and there is not a concrete reason in most professions to return to the offices.”

There is in fact a concrete reason for those who can to work from where they are most comfortable and consider how best to spend the gift of life they are so lucky to have

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...