To some workers, the cubicle "never looked so good;" to others, home sweet home!

 Author Amanda Mull ponders the advantages of the corporate office building as the placement of an employee's desk over its location at the employee's domicile.  Actually, the employee could make use of them both, if he had two locations of his workplace.  Her article, appearing in October's Atlantic is entitled, "A Cubicle Never Looked So Good."

I've worked both locations--the home for the past 30+ years living in semi-retirement.  I can tell you that Ms. Mull is correct in her implied criticism of the home: it's isolated from where the action occurs--viz., at the corporate building.  You experience feelings of lonliness.  But that just leads to the employee's greater attention and spotlight on what he is doing to further the goals of the corporation rather than upon his being liked at the place he performs on the company's behalf.  

And working at home has just as long a history:  in the Middle Ages, the craftsman, e.g., a cobbler, sold his shoes where he made them: his home.  Today, the salesman may have an office at corporate, but he is there infrequently. for he knows his worth to the company is in the places he secures a sale of his company's products.

Also what analysts have noted, during the present period of the pandemic and economic slowdown, is that workers who primarily work at home have greater impact on their neighborhood and locale than when they habitually commuted to the big city.  It has led to the theory that the suburbs will eventually become more "citified" in the goods and services available to those who live and work primarily near home.

Moreover, there is a distinct advantage, which if you've worked in both as a primary location, you're probably well aware.  And that is, the office politics that, when you primarily worked there, can have little effect on your productivity and steps you take toward meeting your assignments and work responsibilities, working from afar.  Whereas you worried over what others around you thought how you proceeded to handle your assignments, you now concentrate on how meaningful those actions are to achieve corporate aims, forgetting what others in the chain of command think about you!