With vaccinations rolling out across the country, the factory whistle is sounding. Employers such as Uber, Google, Chase, and Goldman Sachs are beginning to call employees back to the office, saying it’s time to resume pre-pandemic work patterns. Employees aren’t so sure. They gave up a lot to reorganize their lives this past year and, like the inhabitants of Plato’s famous cave, had their eyes opened to new possibilities. What happens next in this developing standoff could transform not just the traditional office, but the broader contours of our lives.

Then again, there were similar pronouncements during the 1973 energy crisis. When the OPEC oil embargo brought America to its knees, gasoline was so scarce that even police cruisers had their tanks siphoned off in broad daylight. Lines of cars at gas stations became the new breadlines, and fuel was rationed based on whether your license-plate ended in an odd or even number. Highways emptied and my father announced at dinner one evening that he would be sleeping at his office two nights a week, thirty miles away in Dallas, to save gas and money.

The 1970’s energy crises seemed like a mass extinction event for the American way of life. The day of the 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville -- a 5,000-pound "living room on wheels" -- was ending; the era of the Volkswagen Rabbit had begun.

Then suddenly the crisis was over and the movie started back up. Commutes and work hours lengthened. Ford Explorers and Jeep Cherokees took over the roads. Though we now had a Department of Energy and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, it seemed like the most we had gained for all our collective trauma was the habit of keeping the thermostat low and turning off the lights when we left the room.

Knowing how quickly life can snap back to normal made me skeptical this past year as one news article after another proclaimed that the traditional office was dead. When someone said for the umpteenth time that the “genie was out of the bottle” now that people had experienced the benefits of remote work, it was tempting to yawn and issue a weary “plus ça change . . .” rejoinder.

But there does seem to be something percolating up in the present moment. Most people aren’t asking, When can I go back to the office? They’re asking, Why would I ever want to do that?

The reasons for how we work are being questioned as perhaps never before. We know why a road crew laying asphalt or a Hollywood film crew shooting a scene in the financial district need to work on location; an Uber driver can’t yet transport passengers remotely. But why does the Uber engineer, the sales associate, or internal accountant need to do their work at the office?

Employers say, well, consider the value of serendipitous conversations that spark collaboration and creativity. Steve Jobs understood this - look at how he famously designed Pixar’s offices, positioning the bathrooms at the center of foot traffic to help employees bump into each other.

Yes, but didn’t a lot of history’s most innovative business creations happen outside the office? Lloyd’s, one of the world’s largest insurers, began in a seventeenth century coffee house. The New York Stock Exchange was founded outside under a Buttonwood tree, and Silicon Valley pioneers Hewlett and Packard famously worked in a garage.

Okay, employers say, but not everyone has the luxury of a home and yard, with an ergonomic home office and a view of the ocean or mountains. Even some of those who do are desperate to escape the kids, barking dogs, and noisy gardeners.

Agreed. For some people, work from home means work from hell. Let them go back to an office if they’d like, but why drag everyone else with them?

What people don’t realize, employers say, is that remote work has gone well this past year because of previous investments made in company culture, employee training and the like. Eventually, employees will reconsider the benefits and realize that they might as well be living on Mars, given the long, silent days with only a humming fridge or ticking clock for companions.

Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks even contends that unless employees get out of the house and back to work, we run a serious risk of an “epidemic of loneliness.”

Wow. If true, isn’t that a damning indictment of our pre-pandemic way of life, rather than an argument for it? When did it come to pass that our primary social relationships were our cubicle mates, corporate team members, or partners whose company we’re not inclined to seek outside of work? What happened to families and friends, neighbors and hobbies, and other activities that brought us into contact with people for reasons other than an economic purpose?

But it may not even be true. Listen to what Kem Boggs, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at GitHub, a fully distributed -- a.k.a. no-office -- software company said:

Moreover, if loneliness is such a concern for office workers, what about the caregivers stuck at home with small children, or the housebound seniors peering into the outside world through their televisions? Why weren’t we sounding the alarm about these “pandemics of loneliness” before, you know, the real one.

All this is to say that a lot of the arguments for bringing people back to the office ring hollow. Especially when you consider that remote work was thriving long before the pandemic, and not just at scrappy startups.

A client who recently retired from a Silicon Valley tech giant told us, “I was working remotely at home for years, as the head of a globally distributed team. No one had a dedicated office. If you had to go to headquarters, you brought your own device and plopped down wherever you liked. And there was no requirement to stick around all day.”

It doesn’t help that some employers are trying gimmicky measures to entreat employees back. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported on office openings in Australia and profiled the accounting firm Deloitte. A manager wanting to “create a sense of FOMO” to entice people back had instituted “Thirsty Thursdays” with free booze and “Team Tuesdays” where people could share recent accomplishments. As I looked at the photos of smiling employees at their workstations with a beer or wine glass in hand, I thought, “Scooby Snacks” and “Show & Tell.” Was Deloitte advocating for a return to kindergarten?

I flashed back to working briefly at a bank in Houston during college. As part of a “humanities and business” class, I was assigned to the operations department typing checks to companies in Mexico City, Paris, and Seoul, since I’d said I wanted to do “something international.”

The department was staffed with middle-aged employees who were welcoming and amiable, but more interested in planning birthday parties and talking about their weekends than banking details. The shine of going downtown to work in one of Houston’s new gleaming skyscrapers soon wore off.

“It was funny what you wrote to us,” my mother reminded me a few years ago. “You said you’d come to the conclusion that skyscrapers were giant daycare centers for adults.”

It’s striking that employers don’t seem to be able to articulate any compelling need to call workers back. The Deloitte article mentioned nothing about the nature of the work, and most of the executive edicts for a return to the office are vague on the reasons. This makes it easy to question their motives.

Didn’t companies sink millions of dollars into the “hotelification” of corporate campuses or lease build-outs that must be frustrating not to use? Might senior managers be tired of occupying the same real estate as everyone else on a Zoom call and want to reclaim their “status” in the former status quo? Isn’t there a symbiotic relationship between corporate employers and municipalities counting on employee spending to support local businesses and tax revenues to support social services?

However, trying to get back to the familiar ways of working is more likely simple risk aversion and lack of imagination. It must be difficult for some executives to see that they still have a business to run without a logo on the building, a company parking lot, or a sumptuous company cafeteria.

You can see these traits in the emerging consensus around “hybrid work” and the “3-2-2 model” for bringing people back -- three days in the office, two days elsewhere, plus the weekend. It sounds like a breakthrough, but it’s far from a revolution. It’s just a tweak of the traditional five-day, forty-hour workweek -- something that a lot of people were already doing before the pandemic.

When I first heard about this supposedly radical new model, I thought of Peter Theil’s famous quote: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” After all the upheaval and indignities of the past year, all the prognostications that life would be forever changed, and the overwhelming evidence that employees were productive working elsewhere, 3-2-2 is all that we get?

It could be, in the short term, as employers engage in a tug of war to pull employees back into company elevators. However, if there’s a genie that escaped from the bottle during the pandemic, it’s the recognition not just that technology has enabled many employees to do their work from anywhere, but that the focus of work should be on the results (the outputs) and not on the time spent producing them (the inputs).

This is a truth that we’ve known about for a long time, but which has been obscured in our modern economy. In our agrarian past, you showed up when and where the purpose required it - e.g., to bring in the harvest - not to clock hours under the watchful eye of a supervisor. Although Abraham Lincoln supposedly said that ''a lawyer's stock in trade is advice and time,'' he and other nineteenth-century attorneys didn’t charge by the billable hour, as most attorneys do today. He charged a flat fee based on the complexity and results of the case, and it wasn’t until the 1960’s that the Age of the Billable Hour arrived to work its corrosive effect on the legal profession. (2001-2002 American Bar Association Commission on Billable Hours Report)

Before the pandemic, there were plenty of companies managing more for results than dictating the time and place of work. A friend working at a technology firm in Texas managed a coding team in Romania, employing the “asynchronous” work model that gained favor over the past year. Established software developers GitHub and Automattic have demonstrated how it’s possible to establish innovative, sustainable organizations without any real estate assets.

What’s new now - the gift the pandemic has given us - is the willingness to accept the wisdom of results-oriented work. This acceptance, in turn, could lead to seismic shifts over the longer term in how we approach work. Companies may still want an office, but more for a place to visit than a place to live. Bold employers might eliminate the traditional 5-day workweek altogether, and, if results can be produced with fewer hours, it’s conceivable that we could finally get the three-hour work day that economist John Maynard Keynes predicted.

Repurposing our relationship with work could help us repurpose the entirety of our lives. What if time affluence became as important as money affluence? What if bragging rights were assigned not on how long you worked, but on how efficiently you accomplished the goal? What if new work models encouraged people to rethink other models as well, such as the dominant 20-40-20 model for the average years spent in education, work, and retirement?

Not everyone will want or accept the autonomy that comes with results-oriented work. But even a small fraction of the workforce adopting new work habits and attitudes could eventually alter the mainstream. While the short-term future of work may end up looking a lot like the recent past, the pandemic lurching to an end may well be an inflection point, one that finally moves us from the factory-model of the twentieth century into something new and unpredictable - the future.