Nick Kneer was excited to go back to the office. After working from home for about a year and a half, Kneer had missed the camaraderie he had with his co-workers at the Ohio-based university library system where he works as a communications coordinator. He was counting down until he could mingle with students and staff again.
But his excitement quickly faded after the reality of in-person work turned out to be far from what he expected.
Instead, to avoid contracting the delta variant, he ended up locked in a "windowless, cinder block room" - his temporary office - attending most of his meetings via Zoom.
"It was definitely a bummer," he said.
As many office workers head back to the office - even as the delta variant spreads across the United States - employees are facing a bizarre new reality: They're still spending most of their time isolated and glued to their computers for Zoom meetings, email and Slack. With more companies implementing permanent hybrid working options - in which some employees work from home and others in the office - the virtual nature of work may far outlive the pandemic. And with it, so may the quirks of the new office environment.
"There's this weird tension," said Brian Kropp, chief of HR research for the research firm Gartner. "We want everyone back in the office, but we still want everyone to do work by video."
The way people work in offices now doesn't look like how it did before the pandemic. And the technology that allowed many employees to work from home has followed them back into the office, from video conferencing to messaging services and collaborative work programs.
Zoom's latest earnings suggest that video conferencing continues to be in high demand despite offices reopening and employees working in-person. During the second quarter, the company reported that revenue rose 54 percent from a year earlier to $1.02 billion, though that's a slowdown compared to the 191 percent pop the company reported the previous quarter. Still, Zoom marked its first billion-dollar revenue quarter and had more than 504,000 customers using its service.