Trust Your Remote Workers — and Trust Your Workers To Work Remotely

The corporate world really wants the pandemic to be over. We enjoyed a brief and lovely period in which workers had some leverage and power, but corporate leadership is trying to take it back. The foremost battleground for this concerns remote and hybrid work.

Swash Labs went fully remote in March of 2020, joining many other companies around the world in adapting to Covid-19 and trying to find a balance between keeping everyone employed and keeping everyone safe. We’ve stayed that way and have no plans to go back. This is also true for many, many companies. 

However, some corporate thought-leaders have decided that remote and even hybrid work needs to come to an end. They have made what is, at best, a weak and largely anecdotal case in favor of such a change. Most of the arguments boil down to major companies saying that returning to the office is good, actually, and now you have to do it or face negative repercussions. 

Data really and truly makes the most effective case for hybrid and remote work: workers are more productive, healthier, and happier than being in the office full time. We just spent the last three years running an enormous worldwide experiment, and the results being what they are should be enough to make the business case for an active and lively remote work regime. However, corporate culture is uncomfortable with that level of employee autonomy, and it always has been. 

Bad managers and unproductive employees will be that way whether they are in the office or not. What it really comes down to is whether corporate leadership is okay with losing the panopticon-style control that comes with requiring employees to be in the office. Many of them aren’t, viewing this long-overdue balancing of the power dynamic between employers and employees as an attack, or an affront, or some kind of loss. 

“I believe...that if you trust your remote workers, remote work can work.”

That illustrates what the argument about remote work is truly about: trust and power.

I believe — based on both an enormous amount of real data and my own personal experience as a CEO —  that if you trust your remote workers, remote work can work. It does for us here at Swash, just as it does for millions of people in America’s workforce. 

However, if you don’t trust them — if you just absolutely need to see people in their seats as soon as the workday starts in a physical office space to feel like they are doing work, while also probably requiring them to be available outside of work hours, even though they already waste time commuting to and from an office space — you will invent reasons. These reasons may sound like “creativity and collaboration requires in-person attendance.” Or maybe even chestnuts like this, from Strategic Human Resource Management, which you may better know as SHRM:

It is almost impossible to build a strong, cohesive workplace culture if most workers are not actually on-site. Hybrid work environments are more likely to succeed, given the face-to-face component, but fully remote situations are not nearly as conducive to corporate collaboration.

Based on what? Vibes? 

To me, this says more about the people making the demand than anyone else. When you make facile arguments about intangibles to make the case for an edict imposing huge inconveniences on workers, conditions which actively degrade the quality of their working lives, well… it is obviously disingenuous, an argument made in bad faith to conceal a lack of trust. In short: you’re telling on yourself.  

Now, there are certainly people who want to go back to the office, and I think a company of sufficient size and resources to do so should make an honest effort to accommodate them. (And that will work in favor of the corporate real estate interests facing much lower leasing occupancy in the last few years as well.) 

But that isn’t the case for most workers in most companies that adopted remote or hybrid work to survive during the pandemic. For reasons ranging from commuting costs to childcare arrangements to avoiding racist encounters at the office, employees being forced back to the office gain nothing from the change, in real terms. The workers only incur costs. 

Demanding a return to the office isn’t about creativity or work environments or the health of workers — it’s about companies not trusting their employees, plain and simple. And that mindset will hurt workplace culture more than remote work ever will.