Ed Zitron has a long Substack essay on why bosses hate remote work. The article, The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses’ Brains, posits that it’s all about control but probably not for the reasons you’d expect. The proximate fear is that without being watched, employees may work less than the 8 hours they’re being paid for or even work on side gigs.
Of course, ROWE is an obviously solution to that so perhaps there’s something else going on. Zitron’s essay is an extended rant on what that something else is. The crux of his argument is that middle management is essentially a useless position conceived as a way of compensating longtime employees without actually paying them more. Rather, the compensation is being able to boss people around and exercise pseudo-ownership of their souls. Meanwhile, their actual productive work is negligible consisting mostly of holding time wasting meetings. The problem with remote work is that it makes all this obvious.
Most of you will probably reject his arguments as too outré but recognize that they hold a kernel of truth: managerial dislike of remote work is founded on a fear of loss of control and perhaps even a fear for their jobs.
On the other side of the argument, a recent study from the University of Chicago that compares worker productivity before and after WFH found that productivity remained about the same but that workers spent more time working. On the one hand that can be taken as evidence that the fear of workers goofing off is ill founded but there’s still the worry about loss of control. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.