After months of experimenting with remote work, your company is calling you back to the office.
Should you go?
“It’s been weighing on me,” Christina Marcellino, a 34-year-old business development manager for a law firm, says of the back-to-work question. It’s all her working-mom friends in Charlotte, N.C., can talk about. “What is it going to look like? What are we going to do?”
The calculus is complicated, even if you’re comfortable with your employer’s plans for Covid safety. Some companies will, at least ostensibly, give workers a choice; others will ratchet up the pressure or dole out ultimatums. How much do you push back? How do you decode corporate statements to tell you what you really want to know: Will it kill my career if I stay home?
The other variables to analyze feel infinite, the stuff of life: that workout you can now sneak in each morning, the leisurely walk to the bus stop with your kid, the exodus of $15 sad desk salads from your lunch routine. But also, wasn’t the chatter and camaraderie at the office the thing that made work feel…almost fun? Who can even remember at this point?
