That's my situation at the moment, having been able to (thankfully) make a career change fairly recently. I've been to my new office once, which was to set-up and collect my IT equipment, and to meet my new manager at a distance, of course. I've still not managed to put faces to any names with the exception of my manager, the department manager and the engineer who I'm working alongside on a current scheme, who is also in a similar boat as me.Chris5156 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 15, 2021 21:05My concern is that having everyone work from home is fine in the short and medium term, when the people working from home are in established teams, with working relationships and personal connections already in place. Having new people join those teams having never physically met anyone in them, and having no office or base to attend where they can get to know their new colleagues and learn the culture, is a completely different proposition. I know anecdotally of several cases where someone has been recruited to a team who are currently working from home, and working very well; have failed to get to grips with the team or the work; have failed to find a way to fit in; and have left again a few months later. And really that isn't surprising. You don't learn a job by email.
I strongly suspect that some amount of time spent in a shared work space with your colleagues is a more important than these companies currently appreciate, and I expect that in a few years' time many of the companies who sell off all their office space will be finding that the productivity of a workforce working entirely from home has not stayed nice and high. That doesn't mean that we all need to go back to the nine to five, but I think predictions that the pandemic marks the death of the commute are rather overstated. People will work from home more than they did before, but that will be the furthest extent of the change.
We do a lot of phone calls and screen sharing however, so the whole experience hasn't felt quite as distant as I'd expected initially. It's early days yet, but I don't feel like WFH is having a particularly negative impact on me and I feel like I'm settling in well. Having said that, I would wholly understand someone feeling as you've described, and once office work is 're-allowed', I wouldn't mind doing a hybrid of office and WFH, just to get to know a few more colleagues beyond the email inbox!