The future of “work from home” is a hot topic today — and one with the potential to transform our companies and our consciousness.
Leaders of the incoming Trump administration and many business executives want to end work-from-home arrangements. They claim to want workers in the office for greater efficiency and effectiveness. But the evidence is against them, and there are deeper issues at play.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Credit: Andria Lo
Credit: Andria Lo
Fundamental beliefs about trust and human nature shape the debate. Cynicism about people and their ability to be good stewards of their freedoms often underpin the anti-WFH arguments. In fact, the conversation around WFH is a great opportunity to shift our thinking as leaders and as a society. So we would like to offer a counter perspective. Remote work policies are a prompt for us to shed mindsets of fear and scarcity in favor of a credo of faith and abundance.
WFH has worked in co-author Robert Rasmussen’s organization, software and services firm Agile Six. In fact, Agile Six was a fully remote organization even before the coronavirus pandemic. Robert and team were determined not to have offices for many reasons: environmental, social and personal. And this remote-first approach has fueled business success, primarily as a government contractor. Agile Six has grown to more than 100 employees over the past decade.
The wider data also suggests WFH works. Just look at U.S. gross domestic product over the past few years. As WFH grew, so did U.S. GDP: 6.28% in 2023, 9.11% in 2022, 10.65% in 2021. Or consider the conclusions of a major study on WFH last year by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom. He found employees who work from home two days a week are just as productive and likely to get promoted and far less prone to quit.
Even within government agencies, the notion that remote work arrangements are out of control doesn’t square with the evidence. In 2024, the Office of Management and Budget found that federal employees who were eligible for telework were still spending more than 60% of their work hours on-site.
When we ignore these facts, we see old ideology resurfacing: You can’t trust people. And bosses call the shots, not workers.
Two advisers of the incoming administration, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, revealed such beliefs in a November opinion piece.
“If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they wrote.
The term “privilege” suggests employees should have minimal or no authority over how and where they work. It’s the old notion of an organizational pyramid, a pecking order, a patriarchy where the “father”— usually a male chief executive — knows best and should rule with an iron fist.
But this was never a humane mindset, and it’s increasingly outdated. Top-down, domination-based hierarchies are ineffective in the world that is emerging.
That world is faster, flatter, fairness-focused and more fully human than it once was. Businesses that wait for top executives to make decisions don’t respond to threats fast enough and miss out on opportunities. That’s why you see leading companies distributing power more, turning pyramids into pancakes where front-line team members have greater authority, and the business becomes nimbler.
This power-sharing shift corresponds to the wider reckoning underway in organizations and society overall around privilege. Women, people of color and other long-marginalized groups have been calling BS on bias and inequity. Why should executives — mostly white men — have the freedom to work wherever they please while lower-ranking employees have to trudge into the office?
A silver lining of the COVID pandemic is that it enabled us to ask precisely these sorts of questions. The scary disease and stressful lockdowns prompted people to recognize the dignity and value of “essential” workers and to pay more attention to holistic well-being. It was suddenly OK to not be OK. And employees now expect their leaders to continue to be empathetic, more attuned to such things as family obligations and our deeper callings.
This moment calls for a shift away from fearing the worst in people and believing that resources are scarce, and toward trusting in each other and seeing abundance all around us.
Such a positive mindset shift is empowering the next generation of business cultures, as described in Fredrick Laloux’s 2014 book, “Reinventing Organizations.” Laloux, a former McKinsey & Co. associate partner, developed the concept of “Teal” organizations to describe how we are evolving as a species toward a higher consciousness and corresponding way of working.
Teal organizations:
- Prioritize self-management, trusting people to make decisions with high levels of autonomy;
- Embrace wholeness, including our need for personal development and emotional and spiritual well-being;
- Operate with “evolutionary purpose,” treating the organization as a living organism with a calling that might change over time.
We have evolved over the past 10 years. The community of Teal organizations is expanding. And many of the people we meet have shifted toward Teal, even if they have not yet found the words to explain this shift.
Yet our very survival as a species depends on more of us moving to a Teal mindset. A consciousness where we see ourselves as one large human family, we rein in the damage unchecked capitalism is doing to our fragile climate and we meet everyone’s basic needs so we can pursue our highest purposes.
That’s why this WFH discussion is promising. Widespread freedom to work remotely during COVID led people to realize we could better integrate work and the rest of life.
Government and business leaders might be misguided when they call for shutting down WFH. But they are doing us all a favor. This is a perfect time to engage in a lively debate: about surface-level questions of efficiency and performance, yes. But also about more profound matters of believing in each other and evolving beyond a fearful, distrusting mindset to a consciousness of confidence and abundance.
In this way, the conversation about WFH can help us get to better places —- no matter where we end up working.
Robert Rasmussen is CEO of software and services firm Agile Six as well as author of “Better Places: Building Stronger Communities with Authenticity and Compassion.” Ed Frauenheim is a consultant, speaker and co-author of four books, including “Reinventing Masculinity: The Liberating Power of Compassion and Connection.” The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely our own and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of Agile Six Applications Inc. or its employees. As a company, Agile Six remains committed to maintaining a nonpartisan, collaborative approach and aligning with our core values of trust, self-management and inclusion.
