As I sat working from a holiday house, overlooking peaceful ocean and mountain views during the first week “back” from the Christmas break, I found myself contemplating a familiar question: Is working from home good, bad, or indifferent? From my vantage point at the time—despite a growing obsession with the Shipping News for the Port of Otago—it felt pretty good.
At Worklogic, our approach to remote work has always been rooted in flexibility, even prior to the pandemic. We have consistently trusted our people to be the best judges of how and where they undertake their work within the context of their own lives. 
From Revelation to Root of All Evil
Remote working or working from home seems to be in the news, one way or another, every other day. Prior to the Pandemic, it was a marginal issue that quickly became a revelation during the early days of the pandemic. The innovations that made so many jobs that had previously been viewed as being unable to be done remotely meant that remote working could revolutionize the world of work.
The tone of public conversation then shifted – remote working or working from home was something that needed to be managed or “balanced” – yet another task for the modern worker.
Today, some headlines seem to imply that working from home is the root of all evil in the workplace; blamed for disconnection, burnout, and the death of collaboration.
The shifting tide is well illustrated by the Airbnb story. In April 2022, the headlines celebrated “Airbnb’s design for employees to live and work anywhere.” Yet, more recently, even CEO Brian Chesky has moved toward a once-a-month hybrid schedule, noting the difficulty of getting everyone to move to a single location.
Facing the Real Risks
It is worth asking how a concept that promised to unlock such incredible potential experienced such a fall from grace. There are, undoubtedly, real downsides to remote work
Credible research suggests that those working entirely remotely experience a greater sense of loneliness than those who attend offices regularly, regardless of other social factors.
The risk of burnout is notably higher for remote workers.
For many people, working from home blurs the boundaries between work and home life. Many of us remember the early pandemic days, feeling as though we spent 15 hours in front of a computer with little to show for it.
The New Management Battleline
Despite these legitimate concerns, the pandemic proved that the vast majority of people can be trusted to do an honest day’s work and collaborate on complex projects and workflows without their manager standing over them.
Unfortunately, instead of evolving, working from home has become a new battleground in the worker-versus-management relationship.
While the headlines suggest that disconnection and communication challenges are a feature of working from home, experienced leaders of geographically dispersed teams know that challenges of maintaining communication, supporting collaboration, and keeping people engaged over long distances are nothing new.
What does appear to be different about the remote working debate is that management and workers are using a different measure of what is “fair”. Management, keen to get people back into the office, say that they are being fair, because they have developed policy and guidelines that apply to everyone.
Workers, on the other hand, feel that a social contract has been breached – management trusted them to work remotely when it suited management, but now that it suits management for people to be back in the office, feeble reasons are given to justify the demands. For many workers, these justifications are just a smoke screen for the real problem – during COVID, workers felt they were trusted to get on with the job, but now that trust has been withdrawn.
Is being in the office better for connection and collaboration?
The most common justification I hear about why returning to the office is important, is that being ‘in person’ with colleagues leads to better connection, and collaboration between individuals and teams.
I do not dispute that proximity increases sense of connection. Of course it does. The social support we receive at work is good for our overall wellbeing. The meeting that felt like it went off the rails, can be quickly debriefed together in person, but when we all hit the ‘leave meeting’ button, and we are sitting alone in our homes, ruminating over facial expressions ad tones of voice, we often lose perspective on what really happened.
But I’m not convinced that connection and collaboration are all that strongly linked. In my experience, only in the most agile organisations does genuine and enduring collaboration happen, as a result of being physically together. In most organisations, collaboration doesn’t occur, not because of a lack of proximity, but because roles, systems and processes are simply not set up to allow collaboration to occur.
The question shouldn’t be whether working from home is “good” or “bad,” but how we lead through the challenges it presents, and how we capitalize on the opportunities it creates.