working from home

My company decided that my office will be closed for the foreseeable future and I am now a work-at-home employee.  The official line is that this is permanent and not going to change at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I know that things can still change in a heartbeat.

I'm torn on this news.  Being a severe introvert, this has been a bit of a fantasy for me, and it has worked well for the month-and-a-half that I have been doing this.  It has been great having more opportunity to eat with and interact with the family while still being on top of my work.  I will miss my co-workers, though.  It also introduces some instability to my job.  Will my employer continue to consider me or the rest of the people in my office as important when no one physically sees me working, and will this make me more of a layoff target in the future?  It can't help.

I am among those who think this is a harbinger of things to come in business in general.  It often doesn't make sense to pay to lease and maintain business facilities when employees can be just as productive from home.  This pandemic is going to be an excuse for a lot of businesses to drop some facilities expenses from their books.

There are things that are important about an office, but I don't think they're always the things that management says are important about having an office.  The rationale that I normally hear is that an office makes it easier for workers to collaborate.  That may be somewhat true, but technology has come a long way in this regard.  The bigger issues I see are less opportunity to build rapport on a team and more difficulty in training new employees.  I don't have a good, non-buzzword solution for these things, but if someone does solve those issues a lot more business will be removed from traditional offices.

I do think this is going to lead to a fundamental change in much of society, and could be the beginning of a nightmare scenario for extroverts.  Will this drive extroverted people out of typical office jobs into fields where they can interact more with other people?  I know that finance, accounting, and technical fields already have a reputation for being a bit anti-social.  Will marketing, HR, legal, and PR follow suit as people in those fields work more from home?