I am guessing, if you are an office worker over the age of 28, you worked in an office for all or most of your career up until March 2020. That is the story that most of us have to tell – one day in March, we went home, and we didn’t come back. Some of us came back a few weeks or months later to collect our belongings because it became obvious, for one reason or another, that we would not be going back to the office any time soon. One of those reasons was, plainly, a global pandemic. But there was also another reason – work from home… worked.

This is the conclusion that many office-based businesses came to during 2020 and beyond. There was initially trepidation about sending an entire workforce to their living rooms, having no accountability for their working hours, with shoddy home wi-fi and being able to turn off their camera at whim during meetings. And there were hiccups – employees who no longer did their work on time, or people who were unfamiliar with Zoom or other virtual meeting services. Let’s not forget the lawyer who went viral for joining a courtroom session with a kitten filter on and being unable to turn it off. But by and large, employees and employers alike found that the flexibility, convenience, and cost savings of working from home outweighed the negatives.

Catalina was one of those companies that discovered working from home was the way forward. When Tammi Fisher founded Catalina in 2017, we worked in offices on client sites, but we were small enough that having a physical office for just Catalina employees was not yet necessary. In March 2020 we went remote, like everyone else. But, when the push to come back to the office came, we stayed home.
The benefits of working from home for our employees were clear. Working from home is able to provide a flexible schedule, allowing people to adjust their work around personal commitments, which leads to better work-life balance. This is hugely important in our company culture. It also, obviously, eliminates the time and money sink that is commuting. Without commuting comes the cost savings on fuel, public transportation, parking, and even professional clothing. Catalina saw benefits as well – there was the cost savings came from eliminating the need for office space, but there were also less measurable benefits. We have access to a much broader talent pool now, and we take advantage of it. Catalina has employees across the country, and employees have moved from one state to another without any glitches. We also saw high levels of employee satisfaction.

There are challenges, of course. We have employees in multiple time zones, which can make scheduling difficult. And, though we take advantage of collaboration tools such as Teams and SharePoint, it’s undeniable that meetings and shared work are easier when you work in the same office as your team. It’s rare that we all get together, and we have employees who have never met each other in person. Some people may find working from home isolating or may dislike the blur between work and home.

For us, the work-from-home model is here to stay. Though there are tradeoffs, the employee satisfaction and flexibility for both employer and employee it provides outweigh the negatives. To any of our employees who might be reading this – see you on Zoom!