South Africans returning to the office must overcome ‘flabby work brain’

As many South African companies require staff to return to the office five days a week, employees will need to first overcome ‘flabby work brain’ to fully return to the office neurologists and behavioural scientists say.

Employers should not expect workers to simply snap back to the old routine and with good scientific reason, says Linda Trim, director at Giant Leap, a workplace design consultancy.

“Many corporates bring people back to work as they realise the importance of in-office teamwork but working from home and even hybrid working has given us flabby work brains. Remote working messed with our brains and we are no longer properly work fit. It is going to take some time to get our old working rhythms back.”

Trim notes that companies increasingly express frustration with people who worked full time in the office before 2020 but are reluctant to return. “But neurologists and behavioural scientists say the collective forgetfulness for effectively working alongside each other makes perfect sense to them.”

She says they note that some workers have lost the muscle memory in their minds required to get jobs done in an open office setting and like flabby biceps, that muscle has to be exercised to strengthen, according to S. Thomas Carmichael, professor and chair of the neurology department at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, who has been vocal in the US media about the phenomenon.

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We have lost the ability to block out distractions

Carmichael notes that our brains’ selective attention skills and ability to block out distractions is weakened. “Those who prefer to work from home might not like one of his remedies: Make yourself work from the office more often. The brain is really good at understanding contingencies and if we just say we will get things done at home, we do not learn it as well.”

While it sounds straightforward, the effectiveness of working from home created unhappiness about their return to the office for many people. ”We must acknowledge that many workers lose their uninterrupted autonomy in social office spaces. We know how it can be – the first hour of our day can easily be spent saying hello to everybody and getting that first cup of coffee.”

Even small office time wasters have become a major annoyance. “A trip to the office coffee machine, for instance, can take as long as 15 minutes when there is a queue or interesting conversation going on. At home, caffeine is at our fingertips, keeping us focused on what we are doing.” 

Constantly comparing 2023’s office realities with alternative remote-work setups can add to workers’ readjustment difficulties, Laura Giurge, a professor at the London School of Economics, says. “When people start to ponder what life would be like if their circumstances were different, they can rapidly end up drowning in a sea of ‘what ifs’, a psychological concept known as counterfactual thinking.”

Trim says she noticed that many workplaces are quieter now because they are less crowded and that means there can be periods of dead silence punctuated by sudden noise that feels magnified. “But we have to habituate ourselves to all those distractions all over again in order to get any good work done. It takes 20 minutes to get used to background noise, but five minutes of silence before bringing back the noise forces the brain’s process to start over again.”

She says many workers and a few CEOs now view the office as a place to collaborate, but not the only place to do head-down individual work.

A large-scale survey published by Microsoft last year indicated that 84% of employees cited connecting with co-workers as their key motivation for their return to the office. More than 70% said they would go to the office more frequently if they knew their direct team members or work friends would be there.