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As COVID-19 vaccinations continue to run ahead of schedule, many workplaces that went fully remote last year are starting to set timelines for bringing people back to the office—and their employees are not happy.

As reopening initiatives gather steam, I’ve been flooded with letters from people viewing these plans with deep suspicion. Many of them are wondering whether they should even tell their employers once they’re vaccinated, since they fear that knowledge will be used to compel their return to work.

This person and her co-workers got vaccinated back in January but still fears returning:

My grandboss mentioned us going back a few weeks ago and I could almost immediately feel my panic response. I realized I haven’t been around anyone for more than two hours at a time in a year (except for three short occasions), I’m dreading having to wear a mask for multiple hours at work, I’m nervous to be back in spaces with lots of other people (even though I know our spaces are immaculately clean, we’ve still had a few positive cases). I don’t feel like me being there will do any good vs keeping my germs at home and away from people who are immunocompromised. It’s all so fraught and anxiety-inducing.

But bringing people back once they’re vaccinated has been the plan all along, as this manager points out:

I have felt like I am the one taking crazy pills the way some of our staff has reacted to my three-month warning that we will be reopening the office at the start of June. I am impressed we have held it together this long, but it has been a LOT of work and we just can’t afford to keep paying fees for missing things and losing time for development/training.

Part of the problem is one of timing. It’s one thing to plan on reopening in the late summer—Labor Day has been a popular target—but employers talking about bringing everyone back in May or June are ignoring that it’s unlikely we’ll have reached herd immunity by then (and kids definitely won’t be vaccinated yet, which is a concern for many parents).

Workers have also seen over the past year that even when employers claim they’ll implement safety measures, the reality is often very different. Social distancing requirements often go unenforced, and many people report colleagues going unmasked without any consequences. So employees are primed to be incredulous.

Plus, some people just prefer working from home and would rather not give it up. They’re quite happy to have no commute, a more flexible schedule, pets lounging nearby, more casual dress, and easy access to their own kitchen. A lot of us have even found we’re more productive at home, without the interruptions of chatty colleagues.

But the real problem, I suspect, is that in the past year, we’ve experienced a massive loss of trust in our institutions and in one another. After watching the government mislead and fail us on such a massive scale, with hundreds of thousands of people dying as a result of those failures, of course people are skeptical now. We’ve spent the past year not being protected by the institutions that were supposed to protect us and learning that we’d have to protect ourselves. So even at companies that have acted responsibly throughout the pandemic, employees are naturally anxious. When you’ve spent months watching businesses reopen while case numbers rose and governors giving that their blessing, as unsurprising new waves of infections followed, it’s pretty understandable to feel apprehensive of any new timelines for a return to “normalcy.”

Source: Slate

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