The honest paradox of working from home

Here is the contradiction nobody at work wants to name. Outside the working day, we have already voted with our feet. We have decided that the in-person version of life is worth queueing for and worth paying for. The pubs are full again. The departure lounges are full. Parents who can choose between a Zoom classroom and a real one have all picked the real one.

Inside the working day, we tell a different story. We tell our employers we are more productive at home. And in many cases that is genuinely true on the dimensions we measure. Tickets close. Documents ship. The synchronous meeting count goes down.

Two things can be true at once

I think both views are honest. The narrow productivity of solo focus work really is higher at the kitchen table. The broader productivity of teaching, mentoring, building trust, and sparking ideas across teams is harder to measure and almost certainly lower.

When something is hard to measure, we tend to pretend it is not happening. Then a year later we wonder why the new joiners feel unmoored, why a team that used to crackle now feels flat, why difficult conversations keep getting deferred to the next call.

The question I keep asking myself

If we genuinely believed remote-only was the highest form of every interaction, we would also be holding birthdays on Zoom and sending our children to remote schools. We are not. So we should at least be honest with our colleagues that the office argument is not a productivity argument. It is a values argument about what we lose when we never share a room.

Personally, I love working from home and I love being in the office. The point of writing this down is not to take a side. It is to ask my fellow leaders to stop pretending the trade-off does not exist.