Heading back to the office soon?

Happy? You likely would not be on Career Counseling Connecticut’s site if you were!

And you are not alone. The number of calls/e-mails for career changing advisory meetings has skyrocketed as the reality of heading back into the office full time has emerged.

The following excerpt is from a Time magazine article

The Pandemic Revealed How Much We Hate Our Jobs. Now We Have a Chance to Reinvent Work

The workplace doesn’t work. Now’s our chance to reinvent it

Until last March, Kari and Britt Altizer of Richmond, Va., put in long hours at work, she in life insurance sales and he as a restaurant manager, to support their young family. Their lives were frenetic, their schedules controlled by their jobs.

Then the pandemic shutdown hit, and they, like millions of others, found their world upended. Britt was briefly furloughed. Kari, 31, had to quit to care for their infant son. A native of Peru, she hoped to find remote work as a Spanish translator. When that didn’t pan out, she took a part-time sales job with a cleaning service that allowed her to take her son to the office. But as the baby grew into a toddler, that wasn’t feasible, either. Meanwhile, the furlough prompted her husband, 30, to reassess his own career. “I did some soul searching. During the time I was home, I was gardening and really loving life,” says Britt, who grew up on a farm and studied environmental science in college. “I realized working outdoors was something I had to get back to doing.”

Today, both have quit their old jobs and made a sharp pivot: they opened a landscaping business together. “We are taking a leap of faith,” Kari says, after realizing the pre-pandemic way of working simply doesn’t make sense any more. Now they have control over their schedules, and her mom moved nearby to care for their son. “I love what I’m doing. I’m closer to my goal of I get to go to work, I don’t have to go to work,” she says. “We aren’t supposed to live to work. We’re supposed to work to live.”

As the post-pandemic great reopening unfolds, millions of others are also reassessing their relationship to their jobs. The modern office was created after World War II, on a military model – strict hierarchies, created by men for men, with an assumption there is a wife to handle duties at home. Now, there’s a growing realization that the model is broken. Millions of people have spent the past year re-evaluating their priorities. How much time do they want to spend in an office, versus working from home. Where do they want to live, if they can work remotely. Do they want to switch careers. For many people, this has become a moment to literally redefine what is work.

More fundamentally, the pandemic has masked a deep unhappiness that a startling number of Americans have with the workplace. During the stressful months of quarantine, job turnover plunged; people were just hoping to hang on to what they had, even if they hated their jobs. For many more millions of essential workers, there was never choice but to keep showing up at stores, on deliveries, and in factories, often at great risk to themselves (with food and agricultural workers facing the greatest risk of death from remaining on the job). But now millions of white collar professionals and office workers appear poised to jump. Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, set off a viral tweetstorm by predicting “the great resignation is coming.” SHRM, the society of human resource professionals, predicts a “tsunami” of turnover.

But in a sense those conversations miss a much more consequential point. The true significance isn’t what we are leaving; it’s what we are going toward. In a stunning phenomenon, people are abandoning not just jobs but switching occupations. This is a radical reassessment of our careers, a great reset in how we think about work. A Pew survey in February found that 66% of unemployed people want to switch occupations – and significantly, that phenomenon is common to those at every income level, not just the privileged high earners. A third of those surveyed have started taking courses or job retraining. Pew doesn’t have comparable earlier data, but in a 2016 survey, 80% of people reported being somewhat or very satisfied with their jobs.

Early on in the pandemic, Lucy Chang Evans, a 48-year-old Naperville, Ill., civil engineer, quit her job to help her three kids with remote learning while pursuing an online MBA. Homebound, “I was a lot more introspective,” she says, and realized she’s done with toxic workplaces: “I feel like I’m not willing to put up with abusive behavior at work anymore.” She also plans to pivot into a more meaningful career, focused on tackling climate change. “I want to be able to look my children in the eye and tell them I did something that will benefit their future world,” she says.

The deep unhappiness with jobs points to a larger problem in how workplaces are structured. The line between work and home has been blurring for decades—and with the pandemic, has been obliterated completely for many of us. Meanwhile, the class divide between white-collar workers and those with hourly on-site jobs—grocery clerks, bus drivers, delivery people—has not only widened but become painfully visible. During the pandemic, nearly half of all employees with advanced degrees were working remotely, while more than 90% of those with a high school degree or less had to show up in person, CoStar found.

Business leaders are as confused as the rest of us—perhaps more so—when it comes to navigating the multiple demands and expectations of the new workplace. Consider their conflicting approaches to remote work. Tech firms including Twitter, Dropbox, Shopify and Reddit are all allowing employees the option to work at home permanently, while oil refiner Phillips 66 brought back most staff to its Houston headquarters almost a year ago. Target and Walmart have both been criticized for allowing corporate staff to work remotely, while low-paid workers faced potential COVID-19 exposure on store and warehouse floors.

In the financial industry, titans like Blackstone, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs expect employees to be back on site this summer. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently declared that remote work “doesn’t work for those want to hustle, it doesn’t work in terms of spontaneous idea generation” and that even though “you know, people don’t like commuting, but so what .”