What are the challenges of transitioning from remote work to office-based roles?

Commute is certainly a challenge, especially if you are living at a considerable distance from your office. At times the options become thin on the way back.

Not all had the luxury of WFH. Some of us (doctors/other healthcare workers), continued their commutes with the benefit of less traffic. While resuming commutes has its challenges, WFH has its own challenges. Time saved from commute most probably goes into additional time at work which potentially increases fatigue levels and professional stresses. Lack of physical movement adds to the sedentary lifestyle and may increase related health risks. Lack of time spent & related change of scenery in return commute removes the opportunity of mentally switching-off from office-mode. True, commute may add to transportation costs, it gets balanced by reduced costs of heating, coffees, etc. at home. Both ways of working have benefits and challenges.

While there are benefits to working in a structured office environment like fixed breaks and set hours. However its at times easy to get involved at socializing at the office and before you know you have wasted more hours socializing with the colleagues than actually working.

Human nature seems pro-structure and pro-routine. Hence schedules tend to help more than restrict. One tends to get forced to taking lunch (at least be away from desk), inclined to leave office on time, etc. WFH offers flexibility to mix business with personal chores one may tend to do during the day, which can be abused. The downside being needing to use evening time to deliver your day's objectives to cover up for the time used in the day for personal errands, taking away time from family. Humans are generally social beings. One may get carried away socialising more than needed, thus impacting their professional responsibilities.

Of courcez first and foremost you have to deal with the admin and HR side of things like office access and signing in. Then if you are in an environment that supports hot desking, you have to book the seat weekly/monthly. Also in person does mean that others can observe you more closely, such as your teammates and supervisors. And then you have colleagues from other departs who come in just to hang out or take your support on a project they are doing. Successfully navigating all this requires some special emotional intelligence skills.

This is a tricky one. Vaccination was mandated to alleviate this concern to allow public interaction as usual. Logically, higher the number of vaccinated, lower is the risks and anxieties related to sharing space with others. Ideally we should be back to the same levels of concerns as we were pre-pandemic. With pandemic-induced restrictions now relaxed, social-distancing, masks, etc. are more of a personal choice than organisational mandate. Cleanliness and hygiene may be considered more as virtues of life than pandemic-driven impositions. If anything, workforce would wish to seek and maintain a cleaner working environment rather than organisation demanding / imposing cleanliness on employees.

Having seen both sides of it (pre-pandemic work from office [WFO], WFH, and post-pandemic WFO), a general assessment is that WFH brought a larger amount of NEW learning over a very steep learning curve. Resuming office work is more structured and is re-adoption of KNOWN ways of working with the exception of small percentage of people that joined the workforce new during or after pandemic, whom may know WFH as the only norm and would need learning to adopt WFO. We seem to have advanced to a level that our technology is now location-agnostic. Cloud-setups have already taken away in-house servers in most part and our user portal / laptop setup would probably be no different working from home or from office.