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THE LONELY OFFICE IS BAD FOR AMERICA


EMPLOYEES MAY LIKE REMOTE WORK, BUT IT TENDS TO BREAK DOWN BOTH ORGANIZATIONAL
AND NATIONAL CULTURE.

WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week
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The Week’s Best And Worst From Kim Strassel, Jillian Melchior And Mene
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Peggy Noonan
July 28, 2022 6:44 pm ET

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Where are we in the office wars? I think there’s an armistice between the
return-to-the-office side and the work-from-home forces. Perhaps hostilities
will resume in the fall. Bosses are hoping the old reality will snap back as the
drama of 2020-22 recedes, that people will start to feel they need to come back,
or can be made to. The work-from-home people are dug in, believing they’re on
the winning side, that the transformation of work in America, which had been
going remote for years, was simply sped up and finalized by the pandemic. In
this tight job market they have the upper hand. Employers are fighting for
talent: Fire me—I’ll get a better job tomorrow, and you’ll get 50 hours with HR
onboarding my replacement. The balance of power will change if the slowing
economy leads to layoffs and hiring freezes.

The benefits of working from home are obvious: freedom, no commute; it’s easier
to be there for family, the dog, the dentist appointment. Less time wasted in
goofy officewide meetings. I’ve wondered if there is another aspect, that office
life was demystified by what began in the years before the pandemic, the rise of
HR complaints and accusations of bullying, bad language and sexual misconduct.
Add arguments over masks and vaccines, and maybe office life came to be seen
less as a healthy culture you could be part of and more like a battlefield you
wanted to avoid.

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