Irish Examiner view: Full return to office unlikely

Survey shows working from home has been a happy experience for most

Over 95% of workers now favour some form of remote working, with fewer than 5% looking for a full-time return to the office. File picture

A video of a BBC foreign correspondent who presented to camera with her daughter beside her provides a perfect vignette of how our working lives have changed during the pandemic.

Anna Holligan posted outtakes of her daughter trying to attract her attention while she was reporting from the Netherlands on the Eurovision Song Contest and said she hoped it would inspire other working mothers.

But it is not just the lives of working mothers that have been changed irrevocably — and some would say for the better — by the large-scale move to remote working necessitated by a series of lockdowns.

Commute-free experience

For most, it has been a happy experience, as findings from the second annual national remote working survey by NUI Galway have shown. Over 95% of workers now favour some form of remote working, with fewer than 5% looking for a full-time return to the office. While some have said they find it difficult to separate work and home life, the vast majority relish the commute-free experience of working from home.

For the most part, employers were positive too, with just 12% reporting that it had negatively affected productivity. While three-quarters of the organisations surveyed said they had not yet decided how they would operate after the pandemic, one thing is certain — the way we work will never be the same again.