For more than two decades, my weekday routine could be summarized in one word: commute. I would wake up, brace myself for the excruciating brake-tapping drive from the Toronto suburbs into the Thomson Reuters office, and return home nearly 12 hours later.
The numbers tell the story in stark detail. At least an hour each way, five days a week, amounts to two hours a day. Over the course of a year and its 260-odd working days, that’s 520 hours. Multiply by 20 years, and you get about 10,400 hours spent driving. Put it another way, I spent more than 430 days behind the wheel just getting to and from the office.
That doesn’t even account for gridlock caused by accidents, construction, or — in a Canadian winter— heavy snowstorms. One particularly memorable blizzard once stretched my trip home to four agonizing hours of brake lights and idling. And this was in the pre-podcast, pre-Spotify era where I was lucky to have a handful of CDs kicking around the car for entertainment.
The sheer magnitude of that time commitment didn’t hit me in the moment. It was just “the way things were.” You spent more than one-tenth of your day traveling, grabbed a coffee, settled into your cubicle, and got to work. Then the pandemic happened and, for many of us, “the way things were” suddenly became “the way things used to be.”
Remote work, once considered a perk or a novelty, became mainstream in many fields virtually overnight.
I now work primarily from home, often starting my day by posting a news story to HR News Canada or HR Law Canada at 7 a.m., comfortably sipping my morning coffee. That’s a full two hours earlier than I could’ve started on-site at my old office, and, yes, I can already hear my younger self rolling out of bed, bleary-eyed, to face the parking lot that is the morning commute.
Most days, I don’t miss it. Working remotely lets me reallocate that “car time” into something more productive or personally fulfilling. It might mean tackling a writing project, walking the dogs, or just savoring an unhurried coffee with the family. It has also allowed me to focus on a passion project — writing my first work of fiction.
That’s not to say remote work is a magic solution. I’ve lost spontaneous brainstorming sessions — those impromptu chats in the hallway that spark creativity and camaraderie. Video calls and instant messaging are no perfect substitutes for face-to-face dialogue.
On the other hand, I’m also wary of the trend among some workers who insist they should never have to set foot in an office again. I understand the appeal of flexibility, but an all-or-nothing approach seldom satisfies the complexities of real-world business needs. Some tasks truly are better done in-person. Team-building, crucial strategic planning, or urgent problem-solving often happen more effectively around the same table. Workplace culture ain’t dead, folks.
On the flip side, we have senior management — some of whom are rolling back remote work policies with an almost punitive sense of urgency. And nowhere is this tension more visible than in the case of JPMorgan Chase, which dominated my morning news feed. According to reporting by my old friends at Reuters, the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, scorned employee calls to reconsider a strict five-day return-to-office policy.
Dimon reportedly told employees in a town hall meeting: “Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that fucking petition.”
That kind of animosity from the top obviously sent shockwaves through the bank’s workforce, some of whom, Reuters noted, have even explored unionization through the Communications Workers of America — an unusual step in the U.S. finance sector. It’s a reminder that while management holds a lot of the cards, there are still a few in the employees’ deck.
Reuters further reported that around 950 employees signed a petition asking Dimon to soften the policy, citing the bank’s recent record performance. JPMorgan has scored record profits, and its share price has roughly doubled in five years. If remote or hybrid work hasn’t dented results — and may well have enhanced flexibility and morale — why clamp down with such forceful rigidity?
Dimon’s stance left little doubt about who sets policy: “There is no chance that I will leave it up to managers,” he said, citing “abuse” in prior remote arrangements.
What we have here is a clash of viewpoints, magnified by legacy attitudes about where work should happen. It’s not that in-office work is bad — in fact, I often benefitted from being around colleagues for meetings that demand collaborative energy. Nor is remote work automatically superior — there are plenty of days I miss the camaraderie, the impromptu lunch outings, and the buzz of a busy news floor. But this is precisely why a moderate, flexible approach seems so practical and obvious.
An insistence on absolute presence, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, ignores the realities of knowledge work. We know now that employees can adapt and be productive in various environments. At the same time, an ironclad refusal to ever come in under any circumstances strains the bonds that can make an organization feel like a team. The sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle: trusting employees with autonomy while retaining the ability to gather people face-to-face when tasks or team-building goals call for it.
My decades of commuting taught me that time is our most finite resource. If someone had handed me 10,400 extra hours on a platter, what might I have done? Pursued a new language? Taken cooking lessons? Mentored a fledgling journalist?
That time is gone — spent behind the wheel. But that loss also informs my perspective now. Yes, businesses need robust, personal interactions to thrive. But for those who can work partially from home without sacrificing team cohesion or results, it seems short-sighted to deny them the chance. We should find ways to measure genuine productivity and engagement, rather than defaulting to the old metric of “butts in seats” from 9 to 5.
For me, some of the best professional moments now happen at home — tackling a story or brainstorming new initiatives with a colleague in a different province, all before the rest of the city wakes up. Other times, I recognize the value of heading into an office for a strategic meeting or simply to be present among industry peers. There’s room for both approaches.
I don’t believe I’m alone in thinking that total rigidity from either side will do more harm than good. Companies risk alienating their most dedicated performers if they act as though the last few years never happened. Workers risk hurting their own credibility if they refuse to recognize times when being together might benefit the collective.
So if you’re on the fence about remote or in-person work, remember my 10,400 hours on the road. That’s enough time to drive from Toronto to Vancouver and back more than 800 times. Enough to listen to Bohemian Rhapsody on repeat nearly 160,000 times (which, frankly, would have been an improvement over some of the morning radio shows I endured). Enough time to watch The Office — the entire series — roughly 120 times.
And for what? To sit in an office where half the meetings could have been emails? If we can find a balance, and give way to freedom of flexibility, we might just save ourselves from another 10,400 hours of asking, “Why is this lane always the slowest?”
