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VP, Global IT in Manufacturing, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
I remember when we had the work-from-home discussion at a company that I used to work at in the Netherlands. We were pushing to work from home one day a week, and leadership said, "No, we're not doing it because our customer service people have to be in the office, and we want to do the same for everybody." Working from home was already common in the Netherlands at this time, so we said, “Okay, are you saying that no one in a construction company will ever work from home because the builders are out there in the field?”

It takes a lot of time for people to get used to it, and I think it's also different depending on the industry, and the style of management. For example, developers are typically individual contributors. They love to be in their own space, with their headphones up, cranking out lines of code, which makes total sense to me. The hardcore developers often don't even like people, so they want to be as far away from everything as possible, and that's okay. 
CIO Strategic Advisor in Services (non-Government), 2 - 10 employees
For folks that are still talking about it, part of the question should be: Why is there so much conversation around hybrid models, or working from home? Is it because of concerns around productivity? We weren't measuring productivity before, so why is it important to measure it now and how would we do that?

This also leads to another problem that I've heard come up before, which is about people that are working for multiple companies. They have their primary job and then they're working for another company as well, so they get W2s from two different companies. From my perspective, as long as there isn't a security issue or conflict of interest, and as long as they're doing what I'm expecting of them, why should I care? There's this perception that someone should only work for one company, but why should that be?

But when it comes to this other undercurrent that is causing people to question work from home, I don’t know why we are so stuck on it. Unless we're going to talk about things like effectiveness in collaboration and decision making, should it matter? If the person's getting the work done, then I don't care where they are. 
CIO / Managing Partner in Manufacturing, 2 - 10 employees
The issue is it's challenging those societal norms that everybody has grown up with and it requires you to change your mindset and way of thinking. COVID has turned everything upside down, and some of those societal norms have come to the fore and made us ask, why is this the norm? In change management we talk about the significant emotional event and COVID, in addition being a significant emotional event in terms of health, has been a significant emotional event in terms of societal norms around working.
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Advisor | Investor | Former CIO in Services (non-Government), Self-employed

Work is going to go through a radical transformation. We are just at the start.

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No19%

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