What Bosses Really Think About Returning to the Office After A Vacation
When you take an eight-week vacation, you’re allowed to work from home on your laptop. You’re even entitled to take advantage of some perks we didn’t have in the office — free parking, a gym membership, air conditioning, access to a lunch buffet, and more.
But, as one business manager I know recently discovered, not everyone is so lucky. “People just weren’t willing to let go,” the manager told me. After she took a four-month vacation, she was back to working from home for the first time in her life. “We’re not allowed to work from home if we’re vacationing,” she said.
And let’s face it: it’s tough to get a return to the office after a long vacation. “You feel like you’re going to lose it,” she said, recalling one typical day of working from home in which her team was asked to come up with ideas of how to help solve a problem. “I was working on a new project, so I wasn’t sure what they needed.”
While we agree some people should be able to take advantage of working from home, we are still asking: Why? What does it feel like to work from home for weeks at a time without any interruptions? And, even more importantly, why shouldn’t we get to decide when we work from home again?
We wanted to find out. And so we took a closer look at what it feels like to be working from home, and then spent some time talking to bosses who actually tell people to work from home after a vacation.
What’s it really like to work from home?
The first time I ever thought to do this — and the first time I actually told anyone how I did it — was when one of our employees, a sales rep for a local business, asked whether she could use the time off to do her summer reading. “Are you kidding?” we laughed. “That’s what this is for!”