Written By: Lauren Howard
Listen, I thought about it.
This whole return to office thing.
I know there are still people out there who think that true professionalism means being willing to return to the office because it’s vital to a successful career.
That you can’t exercise your full potential in a role if you’re working from home.
I get it.
Wait, no I don’t.
Disrespectfully, since the core of “professionalism” is founded in m!sogyny, wh!te supremacy and treating 45-year-old white men as the status quo… I’m gonna reject alllllladat.
We’re good here.
I do amazing work from home.
I run entire companies and multiple large teams from home.
I became an expert in my field from home.
I have built teams of people who I am closely connected to and who operate together like well-oiled machines from home.
I have done it all in leggings and a messy bun, often with a kid on my lap, not missing their important milestones and still advancing my career.
I make decisions that affect multi-million dollar revenue operations with a dog on my lap and no shoes.
I have gone from director to VP to C-Level to running multiple companies from home.
I’ve learned boundaries from home.
I get easily ten times more done from home than I did when I had to go to the office.
I have built an entire community of like-minded women, femmes, and allies who see blanket statements about how everyone should return to the office as what they are: misogynist, ableist, elitist, outdated tropes designed by people who think the butts-in-seats vanity metric is more important than fulfilled employees who can do the job. Oh, and people who are beholden to real estate developers and property values before the things that matter.
Hard pants and long commutes do not make me better at my job. We can skip the leg prisons and lost hours of productivity and let people work where they’re comfortable.
Can every job be done from home? Oh gosh no.
Does everyone want to work from home? Also no.
But for the jobs that can and the people who prefer it, forcing employees back to the office under the guise of it being “better” for them is just another tool to make real estate developers happy and to placate leaders who care more about the optics of when and how you work than the reality of your output.
And we’re good without all of that.
Founder & CEO at elletwo