Is telework really fostering laziness? Here's why the opposite may be true

Yahoo

13-02-2025

Chloé Jo Davis is the development director at the non-profit legal think tank and litigation fund The Lawfare Project as well as the mother of three children and more than five rescued pets. She gets all this done thanks to being able to work remotely and she told Salon her life is flourishing. Telework allows her to work for a cause she believes in — fighting antisemitism — while maintaining a vibrant personal life.
'Working at home has allowed women like me to have a thriving career that can easily coexist with my mission to be a full-time mom,' Davis said. 'The school hours are simple, and there's no time wasted with commuting or making myself office ready. Sweatpants are fine, and I'm blasting off with my cuppa and emails earlier than I ever would [otherwise]. I'm not getting whatever virus is going around on a packed train, and my lunch hour is spent walking my dogs. By the time my kids get home, I take a 10-minute break to get them settled into whatever they have to do (homework, snacks, hand washing) and then I'm back at my desk.'
Despite such tangible benefits, remote work is under fire, including by two of the most powerful men in the world. President Donald Trump and his top adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, have repeatedly vowed to force as many public sector employees as possible to work in person, an ethos they hope to spread to the private sector. They argue those who work from home are lazy, and dismiss concerns that marginalized groups like disabled people may need to work from home.
'President Trump believes that federal hiring and promotion decisions should be based on merit and who will do the job best for American taxpayers, and that it cannot be based on DEI-related factors that favor some Americans over others and that are not connected with the job itself,' a White House spokesperson told Salon. 'There are undoubtedly many quality federal employees with disabilities. The purpose of this order is that they should be hired and promoted based on that quality work — not based on the fact that they're disabled.'
According to experts, these kinds of arguments ignore the data about the number of people who telework, why people work remotely in the first place and how telework often boosts productivity.
Even though more than three out of five federal employees work in person, Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa incorrectly claimed that only six percent do so regularly. Indeed, a 2022 survey by the Congressional Budget Office found 22 percent of federal workers teleworking, compared to 25 percent in the private sector. As late as August 2023, one out of five workers do their jobs remotely.
Martin O'Malley, who until recently served as Social Security Commissioner, witnessed that literal ignorance firsthand last month when the House Oversight Committee grilled him for allowing his employees to work remotely. Two days before leaving office, O'Malley signed an agreement with workers' unions allowing a minimum amount of telework for 42,000 Social Security employees (98 percent of their staff). O'Malley has long championed improving staff morale at the agency, but congressional Republicans like Reps. Virginia Foxx of Virginia, Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Pat Fallon of Texas claimed that by doing so he encouraged laziness. Reps. Fallon, Foxx and Grothman did not respond to Salon's request for comment.
O'Malley said that in spite of efforts to paint people who work remotely as lazy, working from home actually boosts productivity and keeps workers happy. For political reasons 'they were just there to drive forward their false narrative, which is that federal employees are all lazy, that they don't show up for work,' O'Malley explained.
'That's their narrative: Equate telework, any telework, with 'not showing up for work.'' O'Malley told Salon. 'And if you are giving an answer that is a truthful answer, as I frequently did in that hearing, they would always try to cut me off when I made the truthful assertions before I could complete the sentence.'
According to Stanford University economist Nicholas A. Bloom, this opposition to remote working is partially rooted in a specific form of prejudice: ableism.'Employees with a disability face much higher costs for commuting,' Bloom said. 'For example, one person who was paralyzed from the neck downwards after an accident told me it took him three hours to commute in the morning as his carer had to come in and bathe and dress him, and then his dad drove him to work. So he needed to wake at 5:30am to do this, while if he [worked from home], it was a 20 minute process.'
Bloom added, 'It is also easier to work at home as you can more easily control your working environment including desk, chair, lighting, access to a bathroom, etc.'
While a 2021 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science showed remote workers can sometimes be less engaged, this has less to do with the practice of remote working itself and is rather 'because workers are not all the same and we have to consider different dimensions of personality,' Margaça said.
Research bears this out over and over again. For example, a 2021 study in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that people who are naturally extroverted and conscientious report reduced productivity when they cannot work in person, but this is not true for more introverted, laid back workers. That survey was taken during the COVID-19 pandemic; by contrast, a 2013 study in the journal Industrial Relations (conducted seven years before the pandemic) found call center employees were more productive when able to work from home.
'Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment),' the authors reported.
More recently, a 2021 Uppsala University study comparing Chinese and Finnish workers during COVID-19 found that Chinese workers believed they were more productive in the office, while Finnish workers felt they were more productive at home. On both occasions, evidence found workers were more productive when it came to areas of their job that depended on being satisfied with their employment, but that work/family conflicts caused occasional drops in productivity.
Antonin Bergeaud, an associate professor in the Economic Department of HEC Paris who studied remote working both before and after the pandemic, listed a number of benefits to employers in encouraging remote working: The companies spend less on real estate, can hire a more diverse spectrum of employees and have workers who are more productive (because they spend less time commuting) and are happier. Although there are downsides, such as lack of direct interactions with coworkers and bad meeting management, Bergeaud concluded that there is 'a positive overall effect using microdata on French firms and this was measured before the pandemics.'
Bloom added that, while workers may initially benefit from being in an office so they more easily collaborate, 'once you get about three days a week, diminishing returns set in, and you lose some benefits of [working from home] which is generally quieter (so good for deep work) and saves about 1.5 hours a day for the typical person.' Although fully remote work may somewhat cut productivity, it can more than offset that by cutting 'costs by 30% to 50% because of no office costs and lower salaries, so it can be hugely attractive to employers.'
The main challenge, Bloom and others argue, is the stigma associated with remote work, which isn't helped by people like Trump and Musk. Psychologist and behavior studies expert Dr. Clara Margaça, who teaches at Portugal's Lusofona University, says that people who oppose remote work for a mix of reasons that include not only ableism, but a need they feel to control their employees.
'From a psychological perspective (which is our area of expertise), this attitude is clearly the desire for control,' Margaça said. 'Some leaders believe in the traditional in-office model where supervision ensures productivity and accountability.'
'These traditional/ideological perspectives tend to view remote work as a sign of laziness or lack of discipline, rather than an evolution in workforce management,' Margaça said.
While controlling their employees may seem ideal to these employers, it is unhealthy for their organization in precisely the ways in which remote working can be a boon. Sean O'Meara, the founder and managing director of content at design agency Essential Content and co-author of 'Remote Workplace Culture' with organizational psychologist Professor Sir Cary Cooper, offered a specific example to illustrate the benefits of remote working.
'As someone who works remotely with a remote, globally distributed team, I've been able to integrate healthy habits into my workday in a way that would be impossible working from an office,' O'Meara said. For example, he now walks more often.
'When I worked in an office, I'd take a 30 minute stroll during my lunch hour most days, typically along a busy road with lots of car pollution,' O'Meara said. 'Now, I walk approximately 17,000 steps every work day in the countryside near my home by doing walking meetings.' When he returns to work after brisk exercise, he finds that his mind is more clear.
'The secondary benefit is that I find I am far better able to focus and add value while walking because I am not at risk of being distracted by Slack, email or other notifications,' O'Meara said. 'I am a far better active listener while walking. Nobody needs to take notes because we use an AI meeting transcriber which emails out a summary and transcript, with action points.'
Peter Shankman, the founder and CEO of Source of Sources (SOS), an online service for journalists to gather feedback from the public, echoed O'Meara's perspective: He prefers remote working, both for himself and for his employees.
'I can tell you that as someone who has ADHD, if I ever had to go back into an office, my productivity would drop 95%,' Shankman said. 'Being able to work from my apartment, an airport, an airplane, hell, the Boreal Forest, is one of the reasons I'm as successful as I am.'
Like O'Meara, Shankman points out the advantage of being able to regularly exercise, but he mentioned more as well. As Shankman pointed out, remote working allows him to control his environment, avoid unnecessary social interactions and work when his brain is most productive instead of according to someone else's schedule. Contrary to the notion that people who work from home will get distracted, Shankman observed that he finds it easier to juggle many balls when he is not in an office.
'I'm less overwhelmed by multitasking,' O'Meara said. 'In an office, I'm constantly bombarded with interruptions — emails, Slack messages, people stopping by my desk. At home, I can structure my workday to minimize context switching and focus deeply on one task at a time.'
Dr. Nattha Wannissorn, who teaches molecular genetics at the University of Toronto and consults for the natural health and wellness industry, was able to further break the personal health benefits in working from home by drawing from her unique experiences.
'Working from home makes me healthier and more productive for so many reasons,' Wannissorn said. 'As a former cancer researcher who's very into health, avoiding hormone disruptors and carcinogens is important to me. I cannot control these in an office setting, but when I work from home, I don't need to wear makeup or be exposed to various scented products, furniture off-gassing, or copy machine fumes. Also, not commuting can reduce my exposure to pollution.'
For his part, O'Malley is worried about the future of the agency he used to lead, one on which millions more people will need to rely if the new administration's policies create mass poverty. It is cruelly ironic that an administration implementing work policies that disadvantage disabled people is in part doing so by criticizing the employees at Social Security, an agency that exists to help the economically underprivileged. O'Malley said he goes back and forth about whether the deeper agenda behind many of these policies is to destroy these safety nets for the American people.
'They could very well break Social Security,' O'Malley said. 'I think I said that to them in the hearing. They could very well break it.'
If they do, many of the workers who currently depend on doing their jobs remotely may lack any financial safety net in the near future. For now, though, they embrace their ability to work remotely.
As Davis told Salon, 'Remote work is really, truly a blessing for women like me — to be able to have a robust career and get it all done is a gift.'