my boss wants me to start coming into the office, but I’ve always been remote

A reader writes:

I have been working at my company for three years now. In that time, I have been to the office approximately once.

My work is pretty solitary and doesn’t require me to be in the office. Only a few people in the organization are required to go to the office every day. I am not one of them and neither is my supervisor. Nobody I work with directly is required to go to the office on a regular basis. They can go, but it is not required.

My original supervisor was fine with my team only meeting in person for holiday parties, but she left last year. My new supervisor really wants to get me into the office more. She was surprised I had never been there, and wants me to get everything I need to work in the office.

I am nervous to get the supplies because it would mean going to the office more often — and frankly, I don’t want to deal with the commute. Going back home in the rush hour traffic, the one time I went, took me two hours. It was ridiculous.

There’s just no good reason for me to drive two hours one way, just to do work in an office. I understand my supervisor wants me to connect with other employees and learn more about other roles — but to be frank, I just don’t care about the company enough to do that. I haven’t gotten a raise, not even a cost of living raise, since I started working at this place so why should I put in more effort? It’s silly to me. If it was closer, like a 15-minute drive, sure, I’d go in once or twice week, probably. But traveling around an hour, assuming there’s no traffic is not something I want to do on a regular basis.

Obviously, the job market is crap. My job is writing based, I don’t have a ton of transferable skills, and finding a new position won’t be easy. So what’s a good way to talk to my supervisor and say, “I don’t want to go into the office, I don’t enjoy it and I don’t think it’s necessary”?

You can absolutely try to push back on this. But I think your framing to yourself might be slightly off. It’s not about whether you “care enough about the company” to do it — it’s whether you care enough about keeping your job to do it (or at least it might end up being that). When you ask why you should bother putting in more effort, the answer might end up being “because this is now a requirement of the job, if you want to keep it.”

But you can try to talk to your boss about it and find out more. I’d frame it this way: “When I was hired, it was with the understanding that I would be fully remote, and that was an important factor in me accepting the job. With traffic, the drive can take two hours one way, so coming in to the office more often would be a significant change. I can of course do it on occasionally when there’s something that requires me to be there, but my position has always been remote.”

You could also ask if she can talk with you more about what she’s hoping will be gained by having you there more frequently. “To connect with other employees and learn more about other roles” is pretty vague, if that’s how she’s framed it so far, so it would be good to find out more. Is she concerned that you’re lacking the relationships that would help you do your job better, or that you’re missing knowledge about how other parts of the company operate that could improve your work? That’s potentially legitimate so you should hear her out. And in doing that, see if you can think of other ways to achieve those same goals.

But be prepared that you might hear that the change isn’t negotiable and you’ll need to decide if you still want the job under these terms (a message that’s being increasingly delivered to people in situations like yours). If that’s the case, you’ll need to balance your unwillingness to make the drive against your willingness to leave the job over it. But it’s reasonable to use the language above and see if she’ll be more flexible or not.

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