Privileges at work are easy to give out but hard to take back. This has been true for working from home which was absolutely necessary during Covid, but now some companies are starting to rescind those privileges for various reasons. I’ve been reading about a lot of pissed off workers who have been ordered to return to work full time “just because.”

It turns out “just because I said so” isn’t a very compelling reason for people to hop in their cars and commute two ways to work, deal with day care, and other conveniences they had when they were allowed to work from home. They want to know what changed? Why the mandate? If there’s a good reason, sure, I’ll get on board. Otherwise I would like to know what’s behind the new mandate.

My perspective on this may be a little unique on this issue. While I loved the flexibility of WFH, after 7 years I really missed some of the human interaction. Being isolated at home makes it really difficult to have work relationships in the same way they can develop with face time. At the same time I found it hard-er to get my projects done if I had to come in to the office every day. It’s often noisy and people like to interrupt me when I need to concentrate. WFH allowed me to go head down and really get some isolated time to think through technical issues without being interrupted. So can we compromise here? Yes. Yes we can.

I once had a job and a manager for about 18 months that was absolutely perfect with his WFH policy. In talking to him about it I came to the conclusion that yes, the job requirements will be best met if I utilize some face time with the developers. Whiteboard sessions were extremely valuable and the tools for doing that at the time using Teams were terrible. There wasn’t any way of getting out of coming in some of the time. Fine by me, I like having some element of human interaction anyway, so I’d be glad to come in. How much? I reckoned that I could have a nice balance of WFH and face time with developers if I was in the office about half the time, so 2-3 days a week. Done deal. The best part about it was he empowered me to select which days because it was going to depend on when I could get face time.

The key word here is empowerment. Some managers just aren’t comfortable with it, but some are. Most professionals don’t like to be micro-managed. I realize that some people take advantage of the hands off approach but I tended to reward managers that trusted me to deliver. I preferred if they checked in with me about once a week on how’s it going and then leave me alone and I will for sure try to deliver what they asked for and expected… and then some.

There’s some risk for managers to follow the empowerment path but keep in mind that there’s also risk in micro-managing professionals. We don’t like it and may seek a different role where we don’t have to spend as much time explaining what will get done vs. actually working to try to get it done.

What about accountability? Absolutely. If an employee can’t manage their time with the freedom offered then get a different employee, but don’t randomly come up with policies that are based on power trips. Policies that make it clear who is in charge and knows best. If you already know best about everything what do you need me for?