In Newsweek
From my feature story in the Sept. 29, 2023, issue of Newsweek
Headlines have been screaming lately that America’s honeymoon with remote work is over. These claims miss the mark. The evidence suggests that the full-time office workweek is unlikely to return to most organizations any time in the foreseeable future. What may have started as a pandemic-era dalliance has become, in only a few short years, deeply embedded in America’s workstyle. But there’s a catch….Read more
David H. Freedman 
The fear and concern bosses have over remote workers has less to do with the workers productivity and more to do with their own job protection. While some supervisors are skilled problem solvers, some survive by being the ones who will do the job (badly) that no one wants, by playing on sympathy and historically by simply showing up, especially for long “work days” were they do precious little actual management work and mostly fill in because the organizations don’t actually higher staff to cover when line staff are sick, on vacation or away at training activities.
Remote work especially is a threat along with AI to top management who typically actually do little meaningful work that adds high value to the organization, instead they spend their time managing managers, more of a low to mid level set of tasks. Basically if they were paid based upon their task set rather than their positions they would be paid much less and the organizations would appear much flatter and more like organizations of a hundred years ago than today. Remote working organizations have the potential to best the profits of their competitors for a variety of reasons, the most obvious is lower cost physical facilities, but the other and more threatening one is the replacement of layers of management and pay with remote near horizontal team leaders and as odd as it sounds, competent “office managers”, the people, typically women who often accomplished much of the real work of the supervisory positions they supported (formerly known as executive secretaries).