Author Note: What do our workplaces and offices look like two years post-Coronavirus pandemic? In this fictitious opinion piece, I imagine how the temporary shift to remote work has affected our field—and personally, how it affected me. While this version of the future is imagined, the stats included here are from recent research done by GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com.

June 12, 2022

On March 12, 2020, I raced out of my office at 5:05 pm for what was a familiar post-work scramble: rush to pick up my 6-year-old son at Kindergarten (his school is closest) and then make the mad dash to get my 4-year-old son at his school’s aftercare before it closed at 5:30. Like most days, the 4-year-old was the last child there, sitting by himself with the teacher.

On March 13, 2020, my museum—along with both of the boys’ schools—announced closings in response to the growing Coronavirus crisis. Those closings ended up being longer than anyone anticipated. The boys’ schools never reopened. My organization shuttered its offices until the end of May.

Those two and a half months of quarantine proved to be transformative—for a multitude of reasons. Not only to my organization, but to many in the museum field. The pandemic touched us all. One surprising upshot has been the transformation of my museum’s workplace—a shift that reflects a growing trend among museums in our region—to support a more flexible, teleworking workforce.

The pre-pandemic museum workplace

According to Global Workplace Analytics, pre-2020, about 3% of employees in the museum sector worked from home. Compared with other U.S. industries, the museum field had one of the lowest number of teleworkers. This is despite the fact that, on average, about 56% of U.S. jobs are compatible with remote work and about 80% of U.S. workers would like the ability to work from home.

In my own experience as a museum professional, teleworking was not the norm. There were few exceptions made for flexibility in the traditional schedule. In 2018, I had requested to adjust my own schedule to be able to pick up my children when their school days ended at 3 pm. My request was denied. Hence, my daily post-work scramble.

COVID-19 explodes the workplace

With the pandemic, most organizations here in New England and beyond faced an enforced teleworking environment for the first time. My museum, like most, did its own quick scramble to make sure employees had the tech and the tools needed to work from home. It was a workplace experiment on a massive scale.

The result? A drastically new normal. What started as a forced experiment has, two years later, settled in to become the norm. Once we all realized that it was possible, the benefits myriad and the drawbacks few, why would we go back? It is now estimated that about 25% of the museum workforce here in New England works from home at least one day a week.

During the pandemic, 88% of U.S. office workers worked from home more than one day a week—with most working a full five days a week at home. Surveys done from that time reveal that on the whole, people felt they performed equally well at home as they did in the office, provided they had adequate resources, tools, and a space to work. Managers were satisfied with overall employee performance although collaboration proved to be a challenge. Most telling, 77% of employees wanted to continue working from home at least one day a week. People were satisfied with their well-being and felt that the positive impacts to themselves, their employer, and the environment were significant.[1]

This was certainly true for me. I was surprised by how much of my work I was able to do remotely. As a curator, I have a fair amount of administrative, research, writing, and graphic design (I do a lot of our signage design in-house) work. I had no problem doing all of these tasks at home. Installing exhibitions, managing collections, and collaborating on group projects are the main parts of my job that must be done on site. During the quarantine, our team communicated via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Facetime. Once we reopened our communal office spaces, we adopted a rotating schedule, with workers alternating days in the office and remote. This only applied to positions that were not public-facing and/or could transition to remote work. Some jobs (like Security, Maintenance, and Visitor Services) needed to continue to be entirely on-site.

The benefits

For the past twenty years, working from home has been an overall trend, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. While the non-profit and museum sectors have been slow to join in, the pandemic changed all that. For employees, teleworking offers increased flexibility, removes a lot of the distractions and interruptions found in the communal office, and saves money (and time) in commuting and other related expenses.

For employers, the data is unequivocal: teleworking leads to greater worker satisfaction and productivity and a decrease in worker turnover.[2] It is a way to attract top talent to your organization. As an added perk, it is also much more sustainable. It has been calculated that the environmental savings of working three days on site (and two days remotely) per 100 employees per year saves 390 barrels of oil, 70 tons of greenhouse gases, and 1,800 trees.[3]

The challenges

Teleworking is not without its challenges—particularly for teams that are used to working collaboratively. Planning group meetings gets complicated. As effective as a Zoom meeting can be, it cannot seamlessly replace the face-to-face meetings, brainstorming sessions, or team bonding over lunches that happen organically in our office. Working remotely is not a one size fits all. For some people, the forced quarantine was a gift. For others, it was a stress-causing burden. And as is the case for many museum employees, some jobs and projects simply cannot be done remotely.

Moving into the future

In the museum field, there has been an ongoing, lengthy debate about what can be done to make salaries in our field more competitive with other industries. From where I sit, there will never be enough money to increase worker salaries. Offering remote work is a benefit that costs little (and in many cases, saves money for businesses) and is highly desirable for a majority of potential and current workers. In my case, in 2020, I was finally able to flex my hours and pick up my sons at the end of their school days—a $300 monthly childcare savings. It’s not a salary increase but to my family, it certainly looks like one!  

Whether it’s family, illness, mental health, etc., we all struggle to balance work and life. For many in the museum field, including myself, those months of quarantine were a huge eye opener of just how out of balance things had become. I didn’t know that March 12, 2020 would be my last post-work scramble. I would never have guessed that a pandemic would be the seismic shift that finally changed all that. But my son’s first words when he wakes up in the morning are no longer “Momma, do I have to go to aftercare today?” And I am grateful to have a job I love combined with the flexibility I need and want.

Amanda Wastrom is Assistant Curator at Heritage Museums & Gardens. For a deeper dive into the research behind this article, check out GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com. If you are interested in continuing the conversation, Amanda welcomes your thoughts on Instagram @amanda_wastrom or on Twitter @AWastrom.