My newsfeed — and probably yours too — is chockablock with stories about professional workers returning to their offices. What the pandemic’s grand, unwitting experiment has shown is that the structure of work isn’t just habit, it’s culture.

Work culture varies not by industry, but also by company,  and sometimes even by worker. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, for instance, have their global headquarters a few blocks from each other in Manhattan but are miles apart on their workplace policies — hybrid and report-to-your desk, respectively. Meanwhile, younger professionals are anxious about missing out on skills development and relationship-building, while working parents — having experienced flexibility of time and location — may be less eager to re-engage with their pre-pandemic commutes and intricate schedules...

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