Bad Bosses Can Screw Up Anything – Even Remote Work

A New Study Blames the Wrong Variable

A new study in Management Science, the journal of INFORMS, surveyed nearly 165,000 employees across more than 73,000 U.S. firms. Its conclusion: remote work plays a surprisingly limited role in job satisfaction and retention.

Once the researchers controlled for workplace culture, management quality and communication, much of remote work’s advantage evaporates.

They treated that as a knock against remote work.

I don’t.

Actually, the study found that bad management degrades every work arrangement. Remote, hybrid, in-office – it doesn’t matter. A bad boss poisons the well regardless of where the water sits.

Blaming remote work for that outcome is like blaming the chair for a bad meeting.

The Study Found the Wrong Villain

The INFORMS researchers didn’t say they wanted to make a case against remote work. They simply wanted to know how working remotely affects job satisfaction and retention – after adjusting for those confounding variables.

Their answer: less than we thought.

Authors Christos A. Makridis and Jason Schloetzer controlled for compensation, occupation, demographics and workplace culture. After that, the satisfaction gap between remote and in-office workers largely disappeared. Even more surprising, remote workers were slightly more likely to say they planned to leave within six months.

The authors concluded that remote employees may feel less tethered to a specific office culture. That makes it easier for them to keep an eye on outside opportunities, even when they’re reasonably happy.

That’s a fair observation. It is not an argument against remote work.

The study also found that remote work delivers real benefits – but selectively. Employees in roles requiring less real-time coordination reported higher satisfaction when working remotely. So did employees with weaker relationships with their direct managers.

That last finding is one worth mulling over.

Blame the Boss, Not the Arrangement

When dissatisfied remote workers shop for a new job, the easy culprit is the arrangement itself. Remote work gets the blame.

But look at what the data actually shows. Employees who felt appreciated at work, trusted their managers and saw a path for professional development reported high satisfaction. Their relationship with their managers mattered more than the location of their chair and desk.

Management was the variable that moved the needle. Remote work was noise.

This is not a new problem. I have spent more than 50 years watching companies promote their best contributors into management roles, then act surprised when they struggle.

Technical excellence does not transfer automatically to insightful leadership. A great engineer who cannot communicate, cannot trust and cannot let go will be a difficult boss. Put that boss in charge of a remote team and the same problems crop up.

Remote work does not create bad bosses. Bad training, bad workplace culture and authoritarian personalities do.

The RTO Mandate Is About Pride and Leases – Not Productivity

The study also left out a great deal.

Return-to-office mandates often have little to do with productivity worries or company culture. Those mandates usually come from two places. One is ego. The other is real estate.

Some managers simply do not trust workers they cannot see. They equate visibility with control and control with leadership. That is not a management philosophy. That is insecurity with a corner office.

Remote and hybrid workers have exposed this for what it is. Ever since the pandemic, research has repeatedly linked remote and hybrid work with strong productivity. The honest response would have been to adapt.

Instead, many executives doubled down on return-to-office mandates. Bad bosses reframed their need for in-person surveillance as concern for collaboration and company culture.

The second driver is money. A lot of companies have sunk money into expensive long-term office leases or real estate.

Then the pandemic happened, and suddenly those buildings sat half-empty. Requiring employees to return five days a week is, in many cases, a way to justify sunk costs. Nobody wants to admit they spend $40 million a year on office space made unnecessary by remote and hybrid work.

Neither ego nor sunk cost is a reason to upend a flexible work arrangement that benefits employees and employers alike. Such return-to-office mandates do not improve work-life balance, work environment or employee satisfaction. They protect someone’s pride and someone’s lease.

Your employees know the difference. And in a competitive labor market, they act on it.

Research Shows That Remote Work Works

The INFORMS study acknowledged the benefits of remote work. Then it moved past them quickly. We should not.

Start with time. The average American commute runs about 27 minutes each way, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means the moment you let your employees work from home, you hand them nearly an hour a day, five days a week. That’s more than 200 hours a year.

Ask your team members what they do with that time. Most will tell you they spend time with their family, sleep better, exercise more and arrive at their desks less depleted. That shows up in output.

The productivity data backs this up. In one fully remote Turkish call center, the 3,500 agents handled 10.5% more calls per hour. George Washington University research noted work-from-home productivity increases of 12%.

Not every study agrees. But even those that don’t fail to take the shine off remote work.

Take a University of Chicago study of more than 10,000 IT professionals. Researchers found that during the shift to remote work, employees worked roughly 30 percent more hours. Output barely changed. Productivity fell.

That’s a strike against bad bosses, not remote work. Good managers do not run their people into the ground, whether those people sit in a cubicle or a kitchen. They don’t mistake longer hours for harder work.

Remote work did not sink productivity. Unmanaged hours did.

Work-life balance is also a retention strategy. A Stanford study published in the journal Nature found hybrid work cut resignations by 33 percent, with no drop in productivity or promotions. The research, led by economist Nicholas Bloom, tracked more than 1,600 employees over six months.

So if you want your employees to maintain or improve productivity and not leave for other jobs, you should consider remote or hybrid options.

Office Space, Mental Health and the Bottom Line

Then there is the cost side. Office work is expensive. Beyond paying for square footage, real estate comes with costs for maintenance, utilities, insurance and all the overhead that comes with physical space.

Remote and hybrid work models reduce or eliminate much of that. Companies that make this shift save real money on their bottom line. I have firsthand experience – Tompkins Ventures’ real estate footprint has cost us zero dollars in six years.

Mental health matters here too. Long working hours and brutal commutes grind people down over time. Workplace stress costs U.S. employers an estimated $300 billion annually in lost productivity, absenteeism and turnover, according to the American Institute of Stress.

Flexible work arrangements ease that pressure. A better work environment – even a home office – can reduce that burden meaningfully.

Remote and hybrid workers are not slacking. In most cases, they are outperforming their in-office counterparts while spending less of their employer’s money. Most executives want such a deal.

Good Bosses Don’t Need to See You to Trust You

Good bosses do not need to see you to trust you. They set clear expectations and communicate consistently. They judge performance by output, not by who shows up earliest and leaves latest.

That is basic leadership – not exactly a radical idea.

The best managers I have worked with over five decades share a few traits. They hire well, define success clearly and get out of the way. The results speak for themselves – wherever their team members work.

Remote work and hybrid work do not require a different grade of manager. They require a competent one.

Good managers also protect flexibility without abdicating accountability. A reasonable work schedule with clear deliverables beats a rigid return-to-office policy every time. Employees feel that difference immediately. So does your attrition rate.

I have run a fully remote operation at Tompkins Ventures since its inception. Our culture is strong. Nobody punches a clock. Nobody sits in traffic. And they get the work done.

That’s because company culture does not live in a building. It lives in how you treat people, how you make decisions and whether team members believe leadership is straight with them.

Build a work environment on trust and clear communication, and talented people stay.

Bad bosses won’t do that. Whether their people commute five days a week, two days a week or log in from a home office across the country.

Stop Blaming the Chair

The INFORMS researchers did useful work. They identified the real drivers of employee satisfaction – trust, communication, appreciation, growth. Those things matter more than where someone sits.

But they pointed out the wrong takeaway. Remote work and hybrid options are not overrated. Instead, bad bosses ruin everything they touch.

If your return-to-office mandate is driven by a need for control or a lease you regret signing, and your best people are still walking out the door, stop pointing the finger outside. Look in the mirror first.

Fix the leadership. The work environment will follow. Stop blaming the chair and start looking at who’s running the meeting.