Workers across the country are getting dressed up and commuting into the office after months of doing their jobs from home—only to be forced to attend Zoom meetings and send Slack messages from their desk as if they’d never left their living rooms because the delta variant of coronavirus is spreading fast.
“There’s this weird tension,” says Brian Kropp, HR chief for research firm Gartner. “We want everyone back in the office, but we still want everyone to do work by video.”
The way people work in offices now doesn’t look like how it did before the pandemic. And the technology that allowed many employees to work from home has followed them back into the office, The Washington Post reports.
Beyond the “weird” experience of it all, one of the biggest issues is when two people at the office are within earshot on the same Zoom call. If both people have their microphones on, the ambient sound creates an echo on the call. The only real way to solve it is to make sure others nearby don’t have their microphones on at the same time.
Workers say employees going back to the office, either because of their company’s decision or their personal preference, need to be prepared for a few things: They need to have a good set of noise canceling headphones or earbuds, and be prepared for in-person isolation. Read the full story.
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