Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the new corner office, the podcast where we share

strategies for thriving in the new world of work, where location and hours are more flexible

than in the past. Today's tip is about how to negotiate the ability to keep working from

home, post-pandemic. Various surveys have found that most people would like to keep working

from home, at least occasionally, though it will require a little strategy if your boss

is resistant. Before COVID-19 hit last spring, I got a lot of questions about how to negotiate

a work from home agreement for a day or two a week. This has long been a popular workplace

perk, and yet has often been a hard ask. Many managers assumed people weren't working when

they worked from home. So the perk would be reserved for people who'd been with the organization

for several years, and even then, it could only happen on Fridays. Best to minimize the

opportunity cost, right? Then, in March, we learned that whole organizations could go

virtual overnight. Working from home became a necessity, not a perk. That is still the case

in many places, but some regions are opening back up, and as they do, we're seeing a mix

on work spaces. Some companies, such as Google, are encouraging people to work from home until

well into the next year. But some other folks have written to me to say that their managers

insist that this was really just temporary, and everyone needs to be back in the office.

The second it is possible. If you are in the latter camp, you have a few options. One,

is to survey your fellow workers, and see how people feel about it. If a manager finds

that 90% of her team members feel more productive working at home and want to keep doing so,

well, that is a bit of an eye opener. You might also suggest a hybrid approach. One reason

people resist letting employees work from home is that they think it becomes an either

or thing, all remote, or all in person, and there are definitely some benefits to seeing

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