Business

It’s probably been a few months now since the memo that decreed the end of remote working hit your mailbox. The new normal of the Covid era was over. No more dividing time between kitchen table and the dreaded hotdesk; it was back to the cubicle from now on.

The great reset began with bosses in the US tech sector, suspicious that if a keyboard is tapped in the forest and there’s no one to hear, productivity will fall. By early 2025, several reports suggested that around 70% of South African businesses had recalled their employees full-time. It’s almost the exact inverse of 2021, when nearly four out of five firms had gone remote. In November, I was surprised to find out that Sars was a late holdout against the trend. The tax agency maintained a home working policy longer than most, but now calls had to happen in the call centre and nowhere else.