So what does the future hold for the office and the workers who once inhabited it?Īs it turns out, most workers do not miss it. Teachers and students will return virtually in September. The scripts have remained open on desks - notes in the margins - for six months, seemingly frozen in time.Īt the Collegiate Academy for Mathematics and Personal Awareness, a charter school in Brooklyn, chairs are stacked on desks and lesson plans from March 12 still hang on the wall. The dusty, yellowed newspapers piled high on desks, floors, coffee tables - most of them dated March - gave the space around them an almost sepia tone.Ī few blocks away, at a nonprofit theater company called Ars Nova - a launching pad for artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annie Baker and Billy Eichner - a rehearsal for a new play called “Wet Brain” had been abandoned mid-session. These were the scenes we photographed this summer at three New York City offices - including our own - amid a pandemic that has left millions of people out of work and millions more working from home.Īt The New York Times’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, to see a newsroom silenced during the busiest news cycle of our lifetime was both eerie and poignant. And the lack of remote-relevant specifics is leaving employees anxious.Produced by Anya Strzemien, Jessica Bennett, Tracy Ma and Eve Lyons Organizations may have announced a general intent to embrace hybrid virtual work going forward, but too few of them, employees say, have shared detailed guidelines, policies, expectations, and approaches. Our survey results make the source of anxiety clear: employees feel they’ve yet to hear enough about their employers’ plans for post-COVID-19 working arrangements. That’s because anxiety is known to reduce job satisfaction, negatively affect interpersonal relationships with colleagues, and decrease work performance. See Andrea Alexander, Aaron De Smet, and Mihir Mysore, “ Reimagining the postpandemic workforce,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 7, 2020. 1īesides anxiety and burnout, longer-term productivity in a hybrid virtual model will also require addressing the organizational norms that help create a common culture, generate social cohesion, and build shared trust. Unless leaders address the sources of employee anxiety, pandemic-style productivity gains may prove unsustainable in the future. This sensible decision follows solid productivity increases during the pandemic.īut while productivity may have gone up, many employees report feeling anxious and burned out. As organizations look to the postpandemic future, many are planning a hybrid virtual model that combines remote work with time in the office.

Work from home doing surveys