Humans Do Best When They Do Things Together

Woe betide the knowledge-class worker who criticizes work-from-home (WFH) policies. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, when members of the laptop class became accustomed to doing their jobs via Zoom and Slack, out of necessity at first but later out of preference, it quickly became conventional wisdom to argue that working from home was the inevitable future.

Left unmentioned in this vision of the future are some significant trade-offs for employers and employees, not all of which are easily quantifiable. As Robert VerBruggen’s thoughtful and nuanced argument shows, the WFH question is a complicated one, hinging on the type of job and workplace culture one is discussing. Like Robert, I, too, now do some of my work from home, and enjoy the flexibility that arrangement offers. But this is also a privilege I had to earn after many decades of working in offices, as well as in retail and restaurant jobs. The challenges and expenses of commuting, the logistics of child care arrangements, and the additional costs related to working in an office (professional workwear, meals outside the home, and the like) are still fresh in my memory, as are the benefits related to in-person work: the mentors, friendships, and even (gasp) a few dates that enlivened 9-to-5 office life.

We should acknowledge at the outset that any debate about WFH pertains almost entirely to white-collar or professional workers. Yes, some administrative and basic sales and support jobs can be done from home thanks to technology, and gig workers such as DoorDash and Uber drivers by definition work outside a traditional office environment, but the cultural debate about WFH tends to focus on the needs and wants of a particular class of educated American employee—and those aren’t the people pulling double shifts at Denny’s. It is educated, higher-income people who are most likely to work from home.

This is crucial context for understanding the most recent iteration of the WFH debate, sparked by President Donald Trump’s announcement that federal workers must return to the office in January 2025. The outcry from federal employees was loud (and at times unhinged) on social media, but polling data suggest about half of federal employees had no problem with the return-to-office policy. 

During his first term as president, Trump supported telework and hybrid work arrangements for federal employees, but the return-to-office policy in 2025 was in part a reaction to perceived abuses of remote-work arrangements that developed during and after the pandemic, and the laxity of the Biden administration’s oversight of federal employees. The Biden administration spent years begging heads of federal agencies to get their workers back in person, to no avail. At the end of Biden’s term as president, only 6 percent of federal workers were full-time in the office (and if you excluded security and maintenance staffers, the number was even lower). Sen. Joni Ernst issued a damning report on government waste attributable to abuses of federal telework policies, and suggested reforms that would maintain some WFH privileges but with greater accountability. 

After Trump won the 2024 election, and on their way out the door, Biden administration officials brokered an agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees union to “protect telework until 2029,” at a time when most private sector employees had long since returned to in-office work. Whatever one’s opinion of Trump and his efforts to reduce the size of government through DOGE (which thus far has overpromised, underdelivered, and sparked many lawsuits alleging the illegal firing of federal workers), a reassessment of federal employees’ WFH activities was long overdue.

It might be time to reexamine such policies in the private sector as well. As Robert notes in his essay, there is evidence that flexible work arrangements benefit employee and employer alike. There is also human nature, which tends to push limits when offered the opportunity to do so. The WFH era has produced many happy, productive employees; it has also produced the “mouse jiggler,” a device that allows employees to pretend that they are working from home when they are not. Instagram influencers with handles like “antiworklife” and “antiworkgirlboss” promote workarounds for employees at home eager to pretend to be working. Wells Fargo made news when it fired employees who had been availing themselves of such technological cheats. 

Yet even for honest employees, the evidence that WFH policies make them more productive is more mixed than some promoters of such policies acknowledge. A McKinsey & Company study found evidence of greater inefficiencies and a lack of cohesion among teams in offices where many employees worked from home. Group projects often foundered on miscommunication and time delays when members of teams were remote rather than in the office collaborating in person. 

As well, social science research has shown repeatedly the ironies of our supposedly more efficient communication technologies: One study found that making a request in-person was 34 times more successful than putting it in an email. However efficient an individual worker feels firing off emails from their home office, in practice, many of those requests would be more likely to be fulfilled if they were made in person to their colleague in the office.

Both sides of the argument can marshal studies to show that WFH works—or doesn’t. Missing in many of these discussions are some less quantifiable things to keep in mind when assessing whether remote work is ideal for most people.

WFH policies are being promoted at a time of increasing social isolation. More Americans report having fewer social connections, spending more time alone, and reporting higher rates of loneliness than in earlier eras. However annoying one’s colleagues can be, social interaction is good for us, and it builds camaraderie and collaboration in the context of the workplace. Does this mean everyone should be chained to a desk Monday through Friday? Of course not, but the downstream effects of most of the population spending both their work and leisure time in isolation are unlikely to be positive.

This raises another question: whether the mediating technology through which this work is done (the screen) undermines serendipitous interactions and the richness of face-to-face communication. Slack is not the proverbial water cooler; indeed, it often facilitates what researchers call the online disinhibition effect, when people engage in behavior, often negative, that they might not if they were face-to-face. Always-mediated interactions also make it impossible to admit to errors without leaving an official written trail of one’s actions. A less experienced employee in an office might walk over to a more knowledgeable colleague and ask for help if they made a mistake—with the supervisor having no knowledge of the event. This is not an option for employees doing most of their work through email and other platforms. 

As well, screen-based work offers many more real-time opportunities for surveillance by employers. It is now standard practice in many workplaces for employees to be subjected to keystroke and screen-capture software that tracks their activity throughout the day. (Hence the mouse jigglers.) This introduces a new level of employer surveillance of employees’ private homes and activities and further dissolves the boundary between public and private worlds for employees. 

When discussing WFH policies, people tend to emphasize that it gives them more time to spend with family members and engaged in hobbies, but if WFH becomes the norm, and current data are any guide, many workers will also be engaged in daily practices that habituate them to accept increasing isolation, less in-person contact with other people, more time mediating their work and leisure time through screens, and an acceptance of a higher level of surveillance and data-gathering of their private activities in the home. 

This is a welcome vision of the future for the titans of Silicon Valley (most of whom have the wealth to absent themselves from these forms of employer control). In a now-infamous interview that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen gave to a Substack writer, he called the idea that people should have flourishing lives in the real world “Reality Privilege” and described it as follows:  

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

WFH policies won’t usher in dystopia, but it is worth considering the habits of mind such policies encourage—and some of the unintended consequences those habits might produce at scale, over time. 

Ultimately, as Robert also notes, there are many ways to make workplace flexibility a priority for employees, and we should not make the mistake of seeing WFH as a binary choice. Organized hybrid arrangements where all employees are in the office on specific days, but WFH on others, are just one example of successful policies employers have embraced. 

We should also understand WFH over the course of a person’s career. Entry-level work is often best done in-person, to allow employees to gain hands-on experience and to better understand the workplace culture of their employer. For workers who’ve reached midcareer, a phase that often coincides with the time when many employees have young children or aging parents to care for, employers should offer greater flexibility for employees who have earned it. For the most senior workers, even more flexibility might be possible, with a recognition that the most senior people in a field are often the most valuable for guiding and training others and should still be available in person as well. 

Finally, if employers want their workers to spend more time in the office, they need to invest in making the office more welcoming to different forms of work. Physical workspaces that include places for collaborative projects, rooms for quiet and solitude, traditional meeting spaces, and common areas that encourage serendipitous interactions all encourage healthier workplace cultures. The era of employees being sequestered in cubicles should end. One study noted how crucial workplace design choices are in fostering more productive (and happy) employees. 

Ultimately, WFH should be a privilege, not an entitlement; it should probably not be full-time for most employees, particularly younger workers who benefit from in-person training and mentoring; and it should always come with clear measurements of performance, so employees and employers know what to expect from each other. It should also recognize that humans do best when they do things together, face-to-face, sharing the same physical space. Now that it is always an option to avoid other people, it is even more critical to choose to be in each other’s physical presence at work—even if it’s not every day.