The work day is 8 hours. It takes approximately an hour and four minutes round trip to get to and from work by bus which I understand to be lucky as I utilize public transit to my advantage. That public transit costs $90 a month and on average my eco-friendly Fiesta is about $50 a month to keep full of gas. Catching the bus keeps me from spending approximately $10 a day to park downtown. I’m not a numbers kind of girl, in fact, I’ve always hated math but I ran the numbers, and going into the office 3 days a week costs about $140 a month, 21 hours a month in commuting, and let’s not start on feeding myself once I get into the office and the wear and tear that the commute puts on my car.

In my previous role, I worked from home regularly from 2017-2018 to 2023. Especially if it was open enrollment, everyone went home. We always had desks in the office when we needed it. I used it so little that my brand new car was purchased in 2016 and it’s still under warranty with 53,000 miles on it. Even the dealership is shocked that I haven’t hit the mileage needed to void the warranty.

When the pandemic first came everyone was sent home to work from home. My role as the liaison gathering documentation between the business and tech side had me working two very broken shifts. I did the beginning of the onshore (American) shift and the beginning of the offshore (Indian) shift. I was needed for both since we didn’t have the bandwidth to be all online at the same time and enhancements had to continue as releases never stop. The world may have shut down but capitalism does not and I was working in the healthcare field.

A year after the work from home order the office closed. We knew it was coming because before that Highmark offered everyone office chairs. I had went out and purchased a Bingo set to host virtual Bingo, I hosted weekly trivia in the Teams Chat, and even did virtual happy hour at one point.

We were told to come get the things that we had long forgotten as the plants had already died and my Spiderman blanket had longed for keeping anything but my chair warm. When the plant died so did the office space. That’s why people seem to be quitting rather than returning to office.

While the office died some people flourished. They realized that they could make their kid dinner or see them off to school. They could get housework done and do eight hours of work in 4. Some people were even more likely to pick up the phone after hours every now and then as that newfound level of trust created a form of happiness that some Americans never knew existed. It brought freedom from the commute and the cubical. It was comparable to creating a new level of a relationship with a company and then after a year and a half of employees enjoying the trust, freedom, and extra money in their pockets, employers stepped back and went, “let’s just be friends again.”

Two-thirds of employees said they would rather quit than return to office as at that point going back after having that “trust working together” core value being broken became impossible.

“Kuddos to the people learned their core values and boundaries during the height of the pandemic.”

“Kuddos to people that walk away from people/places/things that no longer serve them.”