Like many other American cities, Huntsville is beginning to emerge from the COVID-induced hibernation, with companies recalling their workers to traditional offices.

A great many of these workers are part of the Federal workforce, who are following the directives of the Biden administration.

At the State of the Union speech, President Biden called on workers to return to the office, saying “It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again. People working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”

Obviously, the Federal government is the largest employer in Madison County, with Redstone Arsenal alone managing over $50 billion in Federal spending. Many firms that exist to service government contracts take their cue from their private-sector counterparts.

National surveying has uncovered a surprising trend among American workers, namely that many of them actually prefer to work at an office – at least some of the time.

Huntsville’s own Taye Alexander, a young engineer working for Huntsville’s defense sector, spoke with the Huntsville Business Journal. Alexander expressed his relief to return to the office.

“I am pleased, because my house was starting to feel like a prison, and not an oasis,” he said. “When I come home, I want to relax and get away from work, but full time telework gave me that opposite feeling.”

Alexander’s sentiments are echoed by others who work for Huntsville’s defense sector. “Jim,” 36, another local engineer, and his wife “Jessica,” 32, agreed to speak to the Huntsville Business Journal under a condition of anonymity.

“Work from home created opportunities for many to split their work day into smaller chunks than the standard 8-hour day broken up by lunch,” said Jim. “However, those who continued to work in the office had more face-time with corporate leadership and will likely be on an accelerated promotion path than those who worked from home.”

Jessica, who was completing her Master’s at UAH during the pandemic, spoke on how surreal the experience of full-time work from home was for her and her husband.

“It was a very disorienting experience for the both of us. It felt like we were repeating the same day over and over again. Looking back at 2020, it felt like one exhaustingly long weekend, or living an eternity in a completely static environment.”

Employers looking to coax employees back to the office, instead of attempting to brute-force the issue, would do well to emphasize the importance of this psychological segregation of Work Life and Home Life. The line between the two has become increasingly blurred and permeable with the advent and subsequent ubiquity of cell phone ownership, and the expectation of availability at all hours of day or night..

This blurring of Work Life and Home Life has the potential to become downright dystopian. Some businesses, such as real estate data firm CoStar, employed facial recognition apps to track employees’ faces and alert managers when workers’ attention strayed from their screen. One employee was berated for stepping away from their computer for two minutes past their allotted 15-minute break. (It is no coincidence that CoStar also lost 37% of their workforce last year.)

A recent national survey by Stanford found that workers can be roughly divided into three camps: around 25% wish to work from home full-time, 20% wish to only work at an office, and 55% support a hybrid work model.

In a hybrid work model, employees’ time is split between remote work and working at an office. Prudential’s Pulse of the American Worker Survey found that, when asked directly if they would prefer to work from home at least one day out of the work week, a whopping 87% of respondents said that they would.

That’s a sentiment that Taye Alexander can agree with.

“In a perfect world, I would go in twice a week, say Tuesday and Thursday, and work from home Monday-Wednesday-Friday. I believe that is a great balance of both environments.”

Balance and flexibility appear to be the keys to retaining a well-ordered, satisfied workforce in a post-pandemic business world. The conditions of the pandemic demonstrated that many of the traditional conventions of work – at least for many office jobs – are simply unnecessary, or at least, they aren’t necessary all of the time. Yet losing the psychological demarcation between Work and Home, as well as the human connection with colleagues, is also suboptimal.

Many of the factors cited by proponents of remote work, such as long hours wasted commuting to and from work in a car that requires upkeep, gas, and insurance, are factors that are not inherent to the work environment of the office, in and of itself, but rather, of the way in which our society has chosen to organize itself.

Building up walkable, livable communities, where people can feasibly live, work, eat, play, send their children to school – all of the things that human beings need to do to live well – without ever needing a car, could solve a lot of problems, and not just in easing the Work/Home dilemma.

Ultimately, businesses need to look at what they need to become successful in the future, not just at how things have been done in the past. Facilitating a flexible balance between remote work and traditional office work appears to be the best way forward.