See you at the office?
Since the summer, the debate around working from home has picked up speed. DNB, Norway's largest bank, is scrapping home office days, and the consultancy EY wants to do the same. In the jungle of opinion pieces in the papers and posts on LinkedIn, facts have become hard to come by.
In a way, working life now has a new calendar: before and after the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I carefully planned which days I'd work from home. The boss had to sign off on it, but whenever I sat at home in my 32-square-metre shoebox in East Oslo, it just felt weird.
The office is much better, I concluded. And I stand by that conclusion today. Despite Teams and video calls, there's something good about swapping home for the office. In the TV series Severance, the characters have two separate consciousnesses: one at work, and one outside. It doesn't feel quite like that when I walk through the office doors, but still, certain things get left outside. And that little ten-minute bike ride is just enough to clear my head and get me ready for the day.
But none of this is grounded in science, numbers or statistics. It's just my experience. And even though I'm mostly to be found at the office, I'm puzzled by the sudden change of mood around working from home.
Soft skills on the menu
At EY, new hires are being encouraged to spend more time in the office. The firm believes soft skills and interpersonal relationships will be crucial for winning new clients and being a good consultant.
This change we’ve seen in the last few years where people have set up their lives to be … at home a lot is just not the route to success in the world of AI – Sayeh Ghanbari, consulting leader at EY UK, to the Financial Times.
Ghanbari is clear that we humans need to get even better at being exactly that: human. Sitting in your home office doesn't build those skills, she argues. Ghanbari has a point.
Talk to Claude
MyIQ carried out a global study with almost 23,000 respondents. Three quarters of them would rather ask a language model than their colleagues. To me, these are frighteningly dystopian numbers. Because when we end up sitting behind a screen all day, with Copilot as our closest colleague, we lose exactly what Ghanbari wants to protect: the human part. In the same study, almost half say spontaneous conversations at the office have become rarer than before.
Young people who are new to working life need someone to lean on, and the move into adulthood can be a big one. A survey from the HR-platform Workday shows that Gen Z (born 1997–2012) are twelve times more likely to feel completely disconnected from their colleagues than Gen X (born 1965–1980). Most of us understand that a working life made up entirely of AI chats isn't good for us.
In dating, people often talk about icks; small or big things a potential partner does that put you off. Well, my office ick is when I ask a colleague for advice, and they open ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot and feed my question into it. I could have done that myself. Asking a colleague is an attempt to get the nuances, thoughts and angles they have. Using AI to give me an answer is, firstly, an insult to my AI skills, and second, it kills the relationship we have as colleagues.
I think the working-from-home debate has to be seen in the context of how we live the rest of our lives. Since the pandemic, we've become more homebound. We now spend a whole extra hour at home compared to before the pandemic, according to an article from the Norwegian science news site Forskning.no.
The few times we're not at home, we're shut inside our own heads thanks to noise-cancelling headphones that block out the world.
Read more about noise-cancelling headsets and bed rotting here:
Sebastian Parry-Jones Øyrehagen
Maybe my argument is a bit of a stretch when the alternative to working from home is over an hour of commuting alone in the car, or on the train. But we have to protect the social side of things in an increasingly antisocial everyday life.
Working from home works
Despite my eagerness to be at the office, something in me bristled when I read about the bosses who want to force people back. I want the option to work from home, even if I don't always use it. Besides, there are numbers and facts showing that working from home is a win-win for employee and employer:
In 2025, a study was carried out among the police in Manchester. There, productivity rose by twelve per cent with a mix of showing up in person and days working from home. But productivity rose even more, by 20 per cent, when tasks were delegated by a manager, rather than just being handed out at random.
Alessandra Fenizia
But here's the interesting bit: productivity did not go up when employees worked from home every single day. The efficiency gain came from those who worked from home three days a week having fewer distractions and saving time on the commute.
A study from King's College London showed that call centre workers also became more efficient working from home. A ten per cent boost in productivity was put down to a more relaxed working environment and more efficient phone calls.
King’s College London
So there are clearly benefits to working from home. My most productive days often happen when I end up staying at home, and the workday starts at seven instead of nine.
Working from home is also practical. Nursery drop-off gets easier. The shopping can be done at lunch so you skip the queue, and the laundry gets done in between Teams meetings. Yet, the executives who've announced that staff need to come back have got it wrong.
Speaking to the Norwegian business news site E24, the Communications Director at Norways' largest bank – DNB – says getting people back to the office will be good for the working environment and give customers a better service. That reasoning is thin.
Why can't DNB just say it like it is?
At a time when 75 per cent of employees would rather ask a language model than their colleagues for advice, we're on the verge of losing the human touch. At a time when young workers feel more distant from their colleagues than ever before, we have to do something differently. At a time when more and more people are feeling lonely, the office can become a place that brings us together.
Working from home isn't either-or. As the UK studies show, you can easily solve it with fixed days where working from home is an option. We really can have our cake and eat it too:
Happy employees working remotely every Friday, a ten per cent productivity boost, and full offices with coffee chats and brainstorming every other day.