PM Modi's views on working from home are echoed by top companies as well

Work from home can be effective only if employees know that it is a privilege, and not a right

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has advised his colleagues in the Union Council of Ministers that they should “reach office on time and avoid working from home to set an example for others”. The advice shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the ministers, as Modi is known to be a hard task master — he had asked his colleagues to work 18 hours a day in his first meeting after taking over as prime minister in 2014.

Modi has given elaborate reasons why he is not in favour of working from home. He wants senior ministers to hand-hold the new incumbents — for ensuring faster approval on files, both the cabinet minister and his junior colleague should sit together to clear proposals etc — this would not be possible in a work from home situation.

Modi’s advice may sound totally out of place in a world where virtual working is an accepted way of life and employees value it as a way to maintain work-life balance. One doesn’t know how his ministers are viewing it, but the Prime Minister might find some backers in the corporate world. At least two of the world’s largest companies have moved away from it because of the perceived negative effects. Many managements have misgivings about allowing work from home on a wide scale because of the behaviour of quite a few employees who have interpreted it as “shirk-from-home”.

These companies give the example of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas Allen who has showed that if people are more than 150 feet apart, the probability that they will communicate frequently plummets. This shows that no amount of Skype or dirt cheap broadband services can compensate for the need to meet physically.

Research also shows working from home is not good for team cohesion and innovation. In 2013, former Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer banned working from home, saying that in order “to become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side”. That is why, she said, “it was critical that we are all present in our offices”.

While there are enough counters to what Mayer said, the fact is face-to-face interaction is essential for identifying opportunities for collaboration, innovation and developing relationships and networks.

Mayer was roundly criticised for her decision. What seems to have rankled everybody the most is how an ex-Google staffer (Mayer was earlier vice-president at Google and worked there for over a decade) could take such blatantly unfriendly employee policies. But some of that criticism was blunted when barely days after her policy came to light, one of Google's top executives said in a talk show that “magical moments” at work could not be created in isolation. Even Google makes sure that as few as possible employees get the option to telecommute as many felt so isolated they changed their minds about wanting to do it all the time.

IBM, a company which embraced work for decades, cancelled its work from home policy in 2017 when it decided to “co-locate” the US marketing department, about 2,600 people, to make all teams work together, “shoulder to shoulder”. This meant employees who worked primarily from home would be required to commute.

In defence of its move, IBM had said its goal was to make the company more agile where “the leaders have to be with the squads and the squads have to be in a location”. The move had surprised many as IBM was one of the early adopters of remote work. As of 2009, when remote work was still a fashion, 40 per cent of IBM’s 386,000 global employees were working at home. 

Overall, work from home obviously has its positive sides as it cuts commuting times and associated fatigue, etc. It's nobody's case that work from home is a bad idea and everyone will now kill it off. Far from it, as it leads to higher levels of job satisfaction and is often a small price to pay for keeping the best talent on your payroll. But it would succeed only if everyone concerned agree that it is a privilege, and not a right. And if managements think that employees are misusing the privilege, they are well within their rights to take that privilege away.