For the past month, I’ve noticed a hilarious trend. An uptick in articles all calling for an end to remote work, be it full or hybrid. People need to get back into the office because that’s how it has always been and should always be.

Each piece is also very telling about the mindset that some people have with regard to work. They are not about ‘working to live’; they are definitely about ‘living to work.’

Full disclosure, my title is yet another ‘clickbait’ one to drag people in for a few minutes of reading my stream of consciousness. The truth is, most people are probably more productive while working remotely than they are in an office.

So, why do we have many managers and even some ‘leaders’ writing pieces that claim otherwise? I believe there are a couple of reasons.

Missing Skill Set

Nobody ever likes to admit they have a failing, particularly in their job. It implies you may not have all the tricks in your toolbox, and can even lead to a dose of imposter syndrome.

Failings, however, or even missing skills, are a good thing for several reasons. A person who thinks they know it all will never learn anything new, whereas somebody who is always questioning if they are doing the job correctly and seeking out feedback will continue to grow and evolve in a role. When that role is being a manager, knowing that you should keep improving your skills means your team will get what they most deserve — a good and competent manager.

When the world started or rather had its hand forced, the remote work experiment revealed quickly that some managers just aren’t capable of managing teams remotely. They had focused their skill set on seeing people at desks, being able to walk over to seats, and measured productivity mostly in terms of headcount and not actual team output.

I, personally, had experience managing people remotely a few years before the pandemic kicked off. With a small team in Paris, while I operated out of an office in Dublin, it gave me a chance to build on a skill set that would come in useful years later. I’ve always believed in the mantra that ‘As long as the work is done, I don’t care where you do it.’ It has served me well. Enabling and empowering individuals to work remotely so they feel trusted pays back dividends in ways some manager training courses don’t mention.

In one organization I worked in, again before the pandemic, I had to introduce the concept of a ‘work from home’ policy because the company didn’t have one. It caused me no end of headaches with HR, but my team greatly appreciated the flexibility it afforded them, and we were, as a result, a high-performing team.

So the pandemic simply exposed a failing that some managers had, but were probably never aware of, and that’s okay. The problem isn’t that they couldn’t manage a team remotely. It was that they didn’t see a need to learn how to and instead went down a different path: making out that remote work was the problem and not them.

Building team culture, ensuring people get tasks completed on time, and keeping everyone outside your team informed. These are all easier to do in an office, but they are not impossible to do remotely either. It just takes a little outside-the-box thinking. More importantly, you should measure a team on their productivity, not how they perform in a crunch scenario or with their manager looming over their desk.

Productive Office vs. Productive Remote

This brings us to the crux of what a lot of these articles talk about. Remote work, be it fully remote or hybrid, is the number one cause of teams being less productive. But what’s the difference between productive remote and office teams?

The answer is bad planning and managers expecting everyone else to go ‘the extra mile.’

When managers plan sprints or work cycles in an office, they, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes on purpose, factor in that people in the office must commute.

Anyone who has commuted in the last thirty years knows that rush hour is a soul-destroying waste of time and energy that happens twice daily. Sitting in traffic, or trying to catch a train, to get to and from an office wastes time. What should be a simple thirty-minute journey seems to treble in length during rush hour, and with most I.T. companies, people can enjoy a little flexibility with their start time. So they feel like they will work a little later at the end of the day to avoid rush hour.

Which is what some managers plan on happening.

Being in the office isn’t making people more productive; they are just working slightly longer days than the typical eight hours the contracts imply they will work so they can travel home in lighter traffic conditions. While they wait out rush hour at their office desk, what better way to kill time than by finishing off a few lines of code, closing out a couple of tickets, or wrapping up that report?

That isn’t the same as being productive, even though some managers would argue otherwise.

In comparison, people working remotely don’t have to worry about a commute. They can put in a solid eight hours of work, and then when they log out, they are already home. This does not imply that a remote worker is doing less than their office-bound counterparts. In fact, they may even do more. Many people I’ve spoken with and worked alongside over the last four years all said they feel putting an extra thirty minutes or an hour into their working day is a good way of appreciating the work-life balance they now have, thanks to not commuting. The net result is that remote workers, reaping the benefits of a better work-life balance, are probably being just as productive as their counterparts being forced to commute because ‘management said so.’

The Wind down Myth

One of the points I’ve seen recycled in the ‘Why working in an office is good for you’ articles is the myth that people actually enjoy commuting.

I would be amazed if there is anybody who enjoys getting up early to sit like a sardine for upwards of an hour (if you are lucky) every day of the working week. Nobody enjoys the commute, and as the years have rolled by, commutes seem to only get longer and longer to cover the same distance.

What a lot of the articles try and state is that the commute home is a good way for people to mentally disengage from the job. It allows them to listen to some music or a podcast, maybe read a book (assuming you’re not driving, of course), and generally gives people a ‘buffer’ between the working world and their home life.

That argument favoring ‘a return to the office’ is the weakest I’ve ever heard. A remote worker can take their dog for a walk or even go for a walk themselves after they finish work if they need to switch mental gears and get out of work mode. All without the unnecessary need to commute home first.

Even the little pig wouldn’t build a house out of that straw argument.

Remote When It Suits

I commented on an article on this site not so long ago stating that companies don’t have their employees’ best interests at heart. I was called cynical, and maybe I am to a degree. My comment was made when somebody accused another Medium author of not being loyal to their company.

The reality is if you worked late nights for twenty years in a job, a company won’t remember you after you retire. But your family sure will know that you weren’t around as much. Loyalty doesn’t mean the same thing for an employee as it does for an employer. At the end of the day, a company is all about making money, and if saving some costs is as simple as letting a person go, all those late nights won’t have much in the loyalty bank at the end of the day.

The same can be said about working remotely. The companies complaining about it now are lucky they are still around to complain about it at all. During the pandemic, when lockdowns were plenty, many companies would have ceased to exist as they burned through their bank accounts while their workers were all restricted to their homes. Why was remote work not causing the same dips in productivity then as it is now? Nothing has changed aside from the fact that offices are now a thing.

Remote should not be something that is only good when it suits the company for the company to continue functioning. Remote, be it full or hybrid, is a balancing act, and as mentioned above, the real issues aren’t that ‘productivity is bad’ but that managers without the skillset are struggling to justify their roles. There are plenty of managers managing teams remotely just fine and maybe even better than they did when in an office. Having the ability to manage people remotely also opens up your talent pool for hiring. The pros of remote work far outweigh the cons of not being in an office.

Not For Everyone

As usual, when I write these articles, I am aware that remote work doesn’t work for everyone or, indeed, every role. No, the construction worker can’t work from home for obvious reasons. Likewise, there are people who are extroverts and enjoy working in an office so that they can get energy from being around other people. All of that is fine.

The problem isn’t the workers. It is the managers who, maybe, deep down, need to understand it is okay to be missing a skill set around remote management.

And look at this as an opportunity to work on that skill.

You’re Not Productive When Remote was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.