Irreal’s opinion about remote work and those who oppose it is well established. It’s basically that absent special circumstances or obvious misfits like retail sales remote work is a win for everyone concerned, employees and employers alike. Indeed, Irreal has often speculated that the insistence on workers being on-site had more to do with some managers being control freaks than any business need. Study after study has shown that in-office policies serve no business need and that remote works tends to foster the results that businesses care about.
That last part is pretty well established now. The part about control freaks could be dismissed as delusional rantings from the Irreal bunker denizens. But now the New York Times has published an article entitled The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week. The reason? The bosses who oppose remote work are narcissists.
That’s not just an opinion. In research that studied bosses for and against remote work, researchers found that the only quality that reliably correlated with opposition to remote work was narcissism. Take a look at the article for details. It’s pretty damning for the control freaks who justify their opposition with meaningless cant about water coolers.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why remote work may not be appropriate for a particular job and there’s some recent research suggesting that working remote 100% of the time may not be optimum. The takeaway is that wholesale opposition to remote work is a more reliable indicator of problems with the denier than with those being denied. Perhaps it’s time for those questioning the motives of employees who want to work remotely to turn their questioning inward.