People got out of their comfort zone during COVID and tried new things.
Campgrounds got packed, people got into skateboarding… if you look at statistics, you’ll see a 2020-ish bump for many interests and an associated sudden growth in revenue.
But the question is how long it will last…
Some outdoor brands that expanded with new stores post-pandemic discovered that many people who tried camping/surfing/etc. only had a fleeting interest and these brands had to close stores.
Tech companies that hired during the pandemic found out a lot of people who tried online meetings/online work only did it because they had to and stopped as soon as they could and these companies had to lay off staff.
But maybe the people who “discovered delivery orders” during COVID won’t ever stop.
> Tech companies that hired during the pandemic found out a lot of people who tried online meetings/online work only did it because they had to and stopped as soon as they could and these companies had to lay off staff.
Quite the opposite: Many (US) companies are still figuring out how to get their office employees to actually start coming to physical offices again.
There seem to have been more lasting pandemic-caused changes of habits in the US than in many other countries, which I also find quite surprising. Maybe people were already more tired of dining out and office work there than in the rest of the world, and that's why the changes in behavior are more sticky?
People only were working remotely that much because everyone was forced to be home which was unprecedented. It can only possibly go downhill from “everyone was forced to be home.”
But even that aside, according to Gallup, exclusively remote employees fell from a high of 70% to a measly 26%(!).
Many employees did transition to hybrid work but working fully remotely is very different than knowing that you’ll see Mary and Bob in the office tomorrow.
Another thing driving people back is actually IT departments. Managing remote devices is difficult and adds a lot of complexity. I did a couple years of contracting after COVID and a lot of these companies had to scramble to figure it out and now have weird hacked together hybrid AD/Intune/AAD setups that now are an unwieldy mess. Buying whatever laptops they could find on short notice has led to random makes and models that present another set of challenges. Much easier to manage when all the devices are in the office and everyone has the same ThinkCenter that gets policy from the local domain controller.
I'm a huge proponent of WFH but I think the cost of the management challenge that presents is often ignored. Is it a net saving for the company? Maybe. IT departments? Absolutely not.
Even the companies with the strongest RTO policies still allow many employees to work from home one day a week / if they are sick / if they are on call / in other extenuating circumstances. So those IT departments still have to manage a fleet of off-premises devices of approximately the same size.
Maybe there are small savings from underprovisioning VPNs, or fewer support requests when people will all be in the office regularly, but that seems tiny in comparison.
The issue isn't a laptop going home once a week, it's never being on the LAN at all after they are imaged. It has nothing to do with "VPN provisioning" or whatever you mean by that. The problem is that all the policies and tools implemented expected the devices to be on the LAN at least occasionally.
Campgrounds got packed, people got into skateboarding… if you look at statistics, you’ll see a 2020-ish bump for many interests and an associated sudden growth in revenue.
But the question is how long it will last…
Some outdoor brands that expanded with new stores post-pandemic discovered that many people who tried camping/surfing/etc. only had a fleeting interest and these brands had to close stores.
Tech companies that hired during the pandemic found out a lot of people who tried online meetings/online work only did it because they had to and stopped as soon as they could and these companies had to lay off staff.
But maybe the people who “discovered delivery orders” during COVID won’t ever stop.