It started with a cough in Wuhan and ended with a laptop on my dining table. Like many corporate Kenyans, I was thrust into the world of remote work with the enthusiasm of a cat being bathed. One day I was navigating Waiyaki Way traffic with the precision of a rally driver, the next I was negotiating bandwidth with my teenage daughter who insisted that the online game Fortnite required “priority internet.”

Adopting a working from home policy for many employers in corporate Kenya has been a mixed bag of good and not so good outcomes in the pajama productivity sphere.

Let’s start with the good news. Working from home has democratized comfort. No more stiff suits, no more awkward elevator small talk and certainly no more pretending to enjoy office birthday cake that tastes like regret and Blue Band margarine.

Productivity for some, has soared. Freed from the tyranny of micromanagement and endless meetings that could’ve been emails, employees have found their rhythm. The 8-to-5 has morphed into a flexible dance of deliverables and deadlines. And let’s not forget the savings on fuel, matatu fare, lunch and the occasional impulse buy at Java.

However on the flip side of this, autonomy, while liberating, can be deceptive. Not everyone thrives in isolation. For every self-motivated superstar, there’s a confused employee staring at their screen like it owes them rent. The lack of structure has exposed gaps in discipline, communication and accountability. Managers, once kings of the open-plan jungle, now struggle to lead teams they can’t see. The result? A flurry of Zoom meetings that begin with “Can you hear me?” and end with “Let’s take this offline.” The irony is that while we are always online, we are rarely aligned.

What about the Kenyan home? It’s not exactly designed for corporate conquest. The average employee doesn’t have a study with ergonomic chairs and noise-cancelling headphones. They have toddlers who believe laptops are chew toys, 5 year olds who slide in on a video Zoom call wanting to say hello to whoever mum or dad are speaking to and neighbors who think 10 a.m. is the perfect time to test their new subwoofer.

And let’s not ignore the darker side of mental health. Isolation, burnout and the pressure to always be available have taken a toll. The office may have been stressful, but at least it had structure. Now, the stress is silent, creeping in between tasks and deadlines. In the United States, following the covid massive shift to working from home, quite a number of organizations began to see the challenging impact of that shift on the workforce and began a return to office policy in varied forms.

Amazon, Apple and Nike for instance mandated a three to four day working week primarily to boost collaboration and culture. In industries where creativity and innovation is the bane of their existence, this is completely understandable. In industries that are customer facing, a stricter policy is required and the financial services group JP Morgan reinstated a full return to office, with a big emphasis on the senior officers. In Kenya, most banks and insurance companies also reinstated the five day working week. For organizations making this move, the primary reasons cited include improved collaboration and innovation, easier mentorship and skill development for new staff, stronger organizational culture, particularly in high paced work environments and major concerns over remote productivity and accountability.

It didn’t help when bosses would be hunting down unavailable staff when they were ostensibly supposed to be at their home desks responding to customer queries or designing a customer solution. Many employers have grappled with the decision of wanting to make their workplaces attractive to younger generation employees who want flexibility, while trying to maintain professional business standards to customers and suppliers. All are key stakeholders who need to be prioritized. The truth of the matter is that the cliché that customer is king will always prevail. After all, it is the customer that brings in the revenue that not only pays salaries to employees, but also pays suppliers and yields a return to the ultimate owner of the busines who is the shareholder.

Working from home was a good experiment that has provided a perfect business continuity framework when employees are unable to get to the office location due to civil unrest, extreme weather events or other unplanned individual personal disruptions. But time has now shown that it can never replace the need for the full time office culture that modern day businesses require. Employers now need to figure out how to strike the generational balance that will keep the office dynamic attractive within the workplace confines. Good luck with that!

X: @carolmusyoka

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