What to Expect When You Get Back to the Office After Lockdown
A guide to the parts of pandemic work culture that are here to stay, and those that aren’t.
Things are about to get weird at work. In many places where offices have reopened, businesses haven’t returned to business as usual. We spoke to managers and employees around the world about the aspects of pandemic work culture that are here to stay—and those that aren’t.
Majid Fareed is a digital marketer for a clothing company with a 50-person office in Karachi, Pakistan. After lockdown, he returned to find the desks 12 feet apart instead of 6. “We wear masks, and each of us has sanitizer,” Fareed says. He goes in three days a week, and on those days the colleagues on either side of him work from home. For meetings, his supervisor stands in the front of the room “like a teacher giving a lecture in the classroom. We don’t move from our desks.” Even so, he prefers office days. “If I stayed home, I’d be more depressed.”