Working at home, the good, bad and boxer shorts

Things are going to change. A lot. Even after the virus

Twenty years ago I worked at my house all the time. Except for attending events as a sports columnist, I was in my home office five days a week.

To be honest, I was a bit of a mess. We were out in the sunny and warm East Bay, so I was in shorts and a T-shirt most days. Sometimes, when I picked up the kids at daycare I wondered if they thought I was unemployed.

But the thing is, I was working my butt off. Every control freak manager thinks at-home employees are watching sports on TV and eating Girl Scout cookies — which I was. But you only have to judge by the work getting done. And I’d put mine up against anyone.

If finally, there has been a lesson to come out of this pandemic it is that, as long as you get the work done and can be contacted easily, it doesn’t matter where you are.

Years later I became a news columnist and we had one of those control freak editors who insisted that we come into the newsroom all day, every day. There were a whole series of issues with that, but whatever . . .

I dutifully put on a dress shirt, sport coat, church pants and leather-soled shoes to come to work every day. On Fridays I’d go rogue and wear jeans.

And people would say, don’t you like that better? Being around people, your friends, to interact and collaborate?

And of course the answer is yes. News people are the wittiest and smartest co-workers in the world. There were nicknames, inside jokes and group dinners.

Subscribing to a newsletter isn’t a real commitment, like buying a goldfish. This shows up in the inbox for free and will never go belly up . . . probably.

But I have to say, business didn’t make it easy for employees in the 2000’s. Companies all over the country touted the advantages of “open-plan” offices. There were lots of ways to describe how “innovative and new” it was.

But what it really was was a long worktable with four or five workstations on each side. Even Mark Zuckerberg, we were told, had an open-plan desk at Facebook. (He does, but having been there, he also has/had an big, enclosed cube of glass room for privacy.)

In our meetings with management we were told we could pick our own design. But when those of us on the design team expressed interest in small cubicles, or even back-to-back seating for a little privacy, we kept getting steered back to the long worktable.

We eventually ended up with a mix of plans, but we were still cramming people together. We’d be able to collaborate, they said. We’d have spontaneous conversations with co-workers.

It was awful, of course. We heard everyone’s phone conversations and when you walked by you would see what someone else had on his/her screen. To shut out the noise, some people used headphones or earbuds.

As early as 2013 the British Psychology Society had a study of 42,000 workers in 303 offices across the united states. How’d they like open-plan? They hated it. Too much noise, no space and field research that said “open plan offices can discourage communication between colleagues.”

So a year ago, when the Coronavirus sent everyone home to work, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Less noise, plenty of space and your own refrigerator in the next room. And as we’ve learned from Zoom calls, quite a few people are working in boxer shorts.

We hear a lot about “getting back to the office,” but I think that ship has sailed. A woman who lives in our building works for a large public entity.

“When do you think you’ll go back to your office?” I asked.

“Never,” she said.

When Salesforce, Microsoft and Facebook announce permanent work-at-home options, you know this is serious and real.

Sharing the newsletter is always a welcome idea. Suggest something like: “I found this to be interesting.” Pro tip, you don’t have to actually read it to say that.

Which, you have to think, is going to affect San Francisco. There have been a lot of stories lately debunking the co-called “California exodus.” The general point is that people are moving around California — like this J.K. Dineen deep dive — because they are calculating that they can live in the Central Valley but still work virtually.

However, that doesn’t mean people aren’t leaving San Francisco. Or that the local economy is poised to roar back.

This week The SF Chamber of Commerce released numbers that employment opportunities are “down 50 percent” compared to a year ago. Most of those, as expected are losses in hospitality and tourism.

But there’s also a huge chunk of office space, a lot of it new construction, in the city. What are we going to do with all that? Bocce ball courts?

And this is where we admit that it is enjoyable to get together with co-workers on a regular basis. Just not every minute of the workday.

A Minnesota pharmacy benefits company, Prime Therapeutics, has come up with an innovative suggestion. An Axios story says the company polled its 2,200 employees and found that “93 percent” liked working at home, but “two thirds wanted to also spend some time at the office.”

So their plan is to encourage work from home at least half the time, then come to the office for regularly scheduled team meetings.

It would sort of be like belonging to a gym. You’d check in on a regular basis, but still be able to work in your comfy home office.

Maybe that’s the future. But I’ll predict some more toothpaste we’re not going to put back in the tube. Now that we’ve gotten cozy with roomy, comfortable clothes, I don’t think we are going back.

This is an odd little hobbyhorse to climb on, but consider the NBA coaches. They were the last relic of the coat and tie on the sideline. Football coaches wear hoodies and whatever it is that Bill Belichick has on. Baseball managers, for some reason, wear a full uniform, sometimes with wrist bands.

And this year the NBA decided to allow coaches to wear zippered sweatshirts. Pretty much what I wear in the morning to read the paper.

The consistently rumpled Steve Kerr had some great jokes about how “my people” were upset because they were about to come out with a personal clothing line. But this has happened and is accepted by everyone.

So, of all the questions that have come out of COVID, let’s add one last one.

Is this the end of the sport coat?

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Suggestions and compliments welcome. Complaints not so much. Twitter: @cwnevius