RTO Takes Some Adjusting

Chuck Nolan, after four years of WFH (source: Dreamworks Pictures)

Historically and collectively, the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most impactful events in a generation. Entire industries were uprooted, resulting in significant shifts in how and where people live and work. The work-from-home (WFH) phenomenon was wrenching for some, welcome by others, and transformational for all. Workers and companies adjusted and continued to operate as best as they could, and WFH became the new normal for entire industries and professions.

Chuck Nolan readjusting to normal life (source: Dreamworks Pictures)

Return to the office (RTO) has been disruptive for companies and workers. Management in some organizations have insisted that personnel plan on working in offices part-time and full-time. We’ve seen the entire spectrum of compliance and non-compliance, and we’ve seen large organizations order a full- or part-time RTO and then backtrack when employees objected.

Workers are finding the transition from WFH to RTO nearly as disruptive in 2022 as WFH was in 2020. The routines established in WFH have become normal, routine, and comfortable. In many organizations, workers can choose whether to return to the office, continue to work from home, or adopt a hybrid arrangement.

WFH is probably here to stay. During the pandemic lockdown, many organizations began recruiting workers from wider geographic areas who live hundreds and even thousands of miles from workplaces. Organizations have discovered that they can compete for workers across larger areas. Workers have found that they can live almost anywhere and do their jobs effectively in full-time, permanent WFH arrangements.

It’s difficult to know whether a gradual shift back to in-office work will occur, or if work-from-home will be a permanent fixture in today’s workforce. Time will tell.

Groundhog Day, WFH, and Eye Contact

The COVID-19 pandemic and working from home for many office workers have wrung the variety out of our lives. Many of us have found ourselves in a Groundhog Day scenario (referring to the movie) where our workdays are a nearly-identical blur:

The variety of our days is mostly gone:

Our commute (from the bedroom to the kitchen to the home-office-or-whatever) is the same: we don’t drive different routes, we don’t make any stops, we don’t experience the weather, we don’t see any scenery, and we don’t see any interesting people or things.

Our workday is more regimented: we have rigid schedules, we don’t run into people in the hall, we don’t have those impromptu, unplanned conversations, and we don’t see each other at lunch.

In short, our work lives have become quite dull – the same routine every day, with little prospect for change.

Here’s an observation from eight years of WFH, particularly since 2020 when we were sent home to work remotely for God-knows-how-long: we no longer look at each other in the eye. This may seem like a small thing, but it feels important to me: eye contact is the most intimate body language in an office conversation, vital because it keeps us honest and connected. In videoconferencing, we can look into the eyes of someone we’re talking with, but when we do so, they see us looking up (or down, if the webcam is at the bottom of our screen). Or, if we concentrate on looking into the webcam and its tiny green dot, we are not looking into the eyes of the person we are speaking with, even if they think we are. You could argue that the use of a smartphone makes this a little easier, but still: we are looking at a video representation of the person, not at the actual person. The result: we are not connected with our co-workers as we should be. The quality of our connected relationships suffers, as if we’re all holding back a little bit.

I don’t have the answers – I’m not a sociologist but a technologist. My observations are as a layperson who instinctively feels like something important is missing in our work-from-home, long-distance work relationships.

I’m going skiing today with my kids. This time of year, I relish the every-other-Friday mental health break of connecting with people and getting outside.

WFH? Live anywhere? Not so fast.

For some, permanent work-from-home (WFH) status provides additional freedom, including where we choose to live. While I was consulting and was a full-time remote worker, for instance, we took this opportunity to move out of the city and into the country, where we enjoy lower real estate costs, fresh air, freedom from traffic and pollution, and small-town life.

There are, however, limits to the matter of where you may choose to live. In many cases, your choice of residency may impact not only your own tax status, but you may also be subjecting your employer to additional legal and financial obligations. The rule of thumb is this: if you stay more than 30 days in a location and work from there, you and your employer may become subject to employment law stipulations as well as taxation.

If you are contemplating relocating to another state or country, check with your employer and your tax advisor first, so that you will have no surprises later.

For more reading:

Living in one state and working remotely from another? You could owe income taxes in both | CNN Business

Can I “Work From Home” In Another Country? | Lawyer Monthly

How working from home due to COVID could be a double tax hit for some | ABC News

So Your Employee Wants To Work Remotely Out Of State | JDSupra

WFH Workers: What’s your Power and Internet DR Plan?

When we all worked in corporate offices, our enterprises (if they were large enough) developed DR plans for power and Internet connectivity, enough that it took a significant event to take a workforce offline. Through economy of scale, workers were all covered by DR plans for power, Internet, and environmental controls, resulting in a decent level of resilience.

APC UPS for laptop and WiFi

But now that many of us are home, our DR is not what it should be. In our home offices, we lack multiple ISP and power feeds. In almost every respect, our critical infrastructure at home (power, Internet, environmentals) are N+0: if our power goes out, or our Internet goes out, or if our heat or A/C go out, there are probably no backup systems.

We are each responsible for our own DR in our home offices. If we want resilient power, we need a UPS and/or a generator. If we want resilient Internet, we have to have a fallback plan. If we want resilient heat or A/C, we must have another source of heating or cooling.

We live in the country, where there’s no landline, no cable, and no fiber. We’ve lived in WA for decades, and are accustomed to extended power outages due to severe weather events. For us, Internet outages are infrequent, but they happen, particularly at harvest time when farm equipment parks in front of our fixed wireless antenna, or when our local ISP is doing maintenance on network elements such as patching routers.

Fixed Wireless Internet Antenna

Here are the details of my primary and backup plans:

Resource	Primary	Backup
Internet	Fixed Wireless WiFi (12Mbps/12Mbps)	iPhone tethering (3Mbps/3Mbps)
Power	Utility Power	Cyberpower UPS for Internet POE (5 hrs) APC UPS for WiFi and Laptop Computer (6 hrs Honda EU2200 Generator Future: 10 circuit transfer switch + larger generator + EMP circuit protection

Our utility power does go out from time to time. Since living here in our present home since mid-2020, we have had one outage lasting ~30 hours, and three outages lasting 1-3 hours. In the more prolonged outage, we fired up our larger generator (not pictured) to run our freezers and charge the UPSs.

Our source of water is a well that is on our property. When the power goes out, we have no water. For this reason, we have purchased a transfer switch that can enable us to run our well using our larger generator (I doubt that the little Honda can power it).

Gas generator

All of these measures have given me confidence that we will have power and Internet for short-term outages. For longer-term outages, the larger generator and transfer switch will enable us to run water and remain in our home for as long as we have generator fuel.

Since I do not work in a corporate office in a commercial building, I must implement my own resilience strategy. No one else is going to do it for me.

Smartphone WiFi hotspot

From a cybersecurity perspective, I’m pretty confident in our setup, but I’m not going to go into details here. We have a commercial NG-Firewall protecting our entire network, advanced anti-malware, secure DNS from cleanbrowsing.org, and other safeguards.