Illustrated by Ivy Liu

Employers and even President Biden said they want people back at the office. But add one more item to the pile of reasons employees are less than enthusiastic about going back to the workplace: the skyrocketing cost of commuting.

Supervisors are called on to help people navigate personal challenges, whether or not they have the training to do so.

Employers are trying desperately to ignore that we’ve become fundamentally different humans.

The great enforced global experiment in working from home is coming to an end, as vaccines, the Omicron variant and new therapeutic drugs bring the COVID-19 crisis under control.

In the new era of work, the term “hybrid” is sometimes misrepresented to mean either HQ or the home office.

Several months into being sent to work from home, Ms. Egziabher got a promotion and an 11 percent raise: “If I had continued going into the office,” she added, “there might have been some excuse around likability.”

The new staples of office life go beyond hand sanitizer and air filters. For some Wall Street banks, they involve natural light, lots of plants and cold brew on tap, too.

Though they might look like the same people, those who left the office at the start of the pandemic have dramatically different priorities, expectations, and needs than those who are returning today, according to Microsoft’s second annual Work Trend Index.

While the pandemic has been harrowing and, at times, terrifying, there have been some upsides to working from home for the past two years.

The desks of yore are dying.

Back to work? This sounds like the obvious end goal we’ve all been waiting for after roughly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. But wait a minute. Does this make sense?