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I visited a friend recently at his office on the 50th floor of a Dallas skyscraper, a perch with stunning views from multiple floors of an expensive building. It was strange to enter an office building for the first time in months, and it was even more peculiar because the place was a ghost town.
This law firm brimming with 150 attorneys is changed, possibly forever. It seems that law can be practiced remotely without missing a beat. The attorneys and other workers have enjoyed the daily gift of two hours not spent commuting.
But about those other workers—how many will no longer be needed as the firm adapts to a post-COVID world? I frequently find myself in detailed conversations about what work will look like in an America pummeled by virus lockdowns.
Mask obligations are waning. Vaccines are taking hold. The coronavirus landscape is improving by every metric. But it is obvious that many avenues of life appear irrevocably changed. We are returning to work, but our workplaces look very different, and some have vanished.
"Working remotely" has often been viewed as a step away from "real" work, which has always featured employees preparing in their respective homes, transporting themselves to a shared location and dispatching whatever responsibilities their careers required in a common space where interaction with colleagues was an understood slice of every day. Those interactions could range from inspiring collaborations at a conference table to idle chit-chat in the break room. "Oh, Tom is working remotely this week" was often nudge-inducing code for "Tom may be getting a few things done, but there's probably some gaming and Netflix involved as well."
Enter the COVID-19 pandemic, and it turns out "Tom" and many other workers forced into remote employment were more productive and attained a healthier work-life balance. This was not universal; for many, the virus experience was one of frustrated parents struggling to complete tasks amid the demands of their home-bound children. "After a while, it didn't seem like working from home," said one. "It felt like living at work."
While workers navigated new ups and downs, businesses learned a lesson they have taken solidly to heart—there is huge money to be saved in sweeping employees out of expensive workplaces. Some employers are on a slow march back to pre-pandemic staffing. My daily workplace is a building that contains a radio network and five individual stations. I never left, but the halls have been sparse for more than a year. It is a joy to see the familiar faces of my returning coworkers.
Many reunions are not happening. Companies are informing staff that they are eliminating or downsizing the office space that used to spring to life at nine and empty out at five. What was once an experiment born of lockdowns will become, for many employees, the new professional normal.
Workers are not the only ones weathering changes. Customers are now plugged into an economy that had to adapt to a world where people were unable or unwilling to show up in person to businesses ranging from stores and restaurants to medical facilities. Groceries and meals have been finding their way to our homes via a vast delivery network that was once an occasional indulgence. Millions of shoppers have scarcely entered a store in 15 months, but see an Amazon driver every few days.
Restaurants are enjoying welcome waves of returning customers because we have sorely missed walking into places where people wait on us and we don't have to wrangle packaging and leftovers. But count me among those who did not miss schlepping all over town to find a list of things I can secure with a few clicks on my laptop.
These changes carry consequences. I don't want stores to go extinct. But the marketplace does what it does, as people vote with their habits and their dollars.
One area in which the new changes have brought positives for providers and consumers is health care. Medical offices have fast-tracked technology that enables them to diagnose, treat and prescribe in a brief video call that spares patients the drudgery of dragging themselves to a doctor's office (perhaps while sick) and sitting for long periods waiting to be beckoned to an exam room. Providers are enjoying more efficiency while patients enjoy more convenience.
One wonders when we would have realized this possibility for progress without the dreadful urgency of our COVID nightmare. We are creatures of habit; it is hard to pry businesses from longstanding practices that seemed to work. As we enjoy the relief of emerging from this dark chapter, there are some silver linings we can point to in the aftermath. However beneficial some of the pandemic's changes may be, they will never outweigh the cost of so many lost lives and lost liberties.
One of the best parts of putting COVID behind us is the rediscovery of the human contact we were denied for so long. We are gathering again, seeing each other's unmasked faces, tentatively rediscovering handshakes and even hugs. But in countless workplaces, there will be no more handshakes with colleagues, no more chatter about last night's game, no more smiles while passing in the hallway.
Perhaps after a period of remote employment by choice rather than at the knifepoint of a deadly virus, businesses will decide that on balance, they want their workers back under one roof. Downtowns can rediscover lost vigor. The lunch spots that served them can rise from the dead. And maybe our ultimate lesson will be that home is home and work is work and there has always been value in that distinction.
Mark Davis is a talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
