Why Work from Home Doesn't Work? Culture and Cognitive Bias.

As companies ready up to hire new talent, and re-examine their benefits, work-from-home ("telecommuting", "WFH") falls front and center once more. Given financial and productivity costs, companies ask "is it worth it?", to which Aetna, IBM, Reddit and an increasing amount of other companies are saying "no", even as they admit to no loss in productivity among their employees.

The argument to keep WFH is that employees want the benefit of flexibility, and employers want fresh talent. As a result, it remains in place to woo Millennials, who want work-life balance, and Gen Z who are looking for work-life integration. However, data are beginning to show that younger employees are flocking back to the office. But, why?

According to Harvard Business Review, many Millennials and Gen Zers want to be promoted, want to belong to a community, and want to be mentored. They very well know they need to be in the office to reap those benefits, even if they want to use WFH. In addition, like their Boomer and X counterparts, they are unsure of the expectations around work-from-home if there is potentially conflicting information from policy, their co-workers, and management. They therefore cannot take advantage of telecommuting as much as they would like to. In other words, there is a huge disconnect in expectations around work-from-home.

The problem is not so much as telecommuting causing accountability and efficiency issues but telecommuting amplifying issues that are inherently wrong with company culture and cognitive biases when it comes to work-from-home. This post does not argue against WFH (in fact, the author greatly supports a robust WFH policy), but instead shows how a faulty or misaligned culture, and cognitive biases in the workplace create "designed to fail" a WFH policy.

Culture

Culture-Benefit Alignment

The primary reason why work-from-home may not work is because there is a misalignment between culture and policy. That is, the cultural values of the organization may clash with the policy to create confusing messages, and therefore create an ineffective policy for everyone. To see how this plays out, let us look at Tesla and Airbnb, and their cultural values.

Tesla: Employees on Glassdoor report a lack of work-life balance.

1.   Move Fast

2.   Constantly Innovate

3.   We are ALL IN

Airbnb: Even though WFH is a fixed number of days, employees on Glassdoor love it.

1.   Be a Host

2.   Champion the Mission ("Belong Anywhere")

3.   Embrace the Adventure

Tesla's culture relies on speed, all-in attitude, and hard work, while Airbnb relies on exploration, inclusion, and belonging. Both are striving for the same thing: creativity and innovation, but they achieve the same results from different values. So, when a benefit like work-from-home is being examined, it is clear that it is incompatible for Tesla because "move fast" and "we are ALL in" conflict with telecommuting, which tends to slow down by complicating communications and depicts the employer as not "all in" to the employer. While not a perfect fit for Airbnb (that is why they have a travel stipend too), WFH fits much more into their culture because they incentivize exploration, and strive to make environments feel more homey as part of their culture.

When a company decides to implement a work-from-home policy for its employees, it cannot clash with the culture, or else the company has designed a system to fail where employees cannot access the benefit without suffering, and the employer cannot retain misled employees effectively. Culture and benefit must align for such a policy to work.

Management and Expectations

Social norms and management play a large role in the success of whether a benefit is used by employees or not.

Imagine that you join a company that prides itself on its unlimited work-from-home policy. They stress it in the interview, and they affirm you even when you ask for further clarification. After successfully transitioning into the role after six months, you decide to work from home three times a week because you can get more work done in the same amount of time you spend at work. Also, as a parent, you would like to spend some more time volunteering at your daughter's kindergarten school. Within two weeks, your co-workers tell you "Hey, you can't be out that often, no one does that". By the third week, your manager mentions to you that she's concerned by your sudden increase in absenteeism at work to which you reply that you are using the work-from-home policy within limits. But she and your co-workers disagree. You are coerced to come back to the office five times a week with the use of WFH once or twice a month.

This scenarios happens more often than most think.

The issue here is that there is a lack of expectations for you coming into the role, and so the social pressure eventually forces you to conform to avoid uncessary backlash. Like a baby that needs parents and others to model healthy behaviors, managers and senior level employees must make use of the benefit— in this case WFH— and model what is acceptable and what is not. In the scenario, your manager should have modelled expected behavior for you. Even if the policy is unlimited WFH, and managers tend to WFH only once or twice a year, it will set a precedent for their teams. In this case, managers need to work from home more, or need to thoroughly communicate the expectations around work-from-home. Furthermore, to truly institutionalize a policy, executives must model this behavior as well as they are the cultural gatekeepers for their organization. If top leadership dislikes WFH, but begrudgingly accepts the policy to recruit talent, WFH will have a negative connotation in the organization, which will inform the cognitive biases in the workplace.

Biases

The mere-exposure and proximity effects

The mere-exposure effect is the idea that we develop a like or preference for something because of repeated exposure to it. Psychology finds that even when we're exposed to something neutral or negative, we still develop a positive attitude of it. The exception is when we have a negative association beforehand, then mere-exposure makes us dislike the item/person even more. What causes positive attitudes with mere-exposure is high fluency, or the ability to process information quicker, because it makes our lives easier. In the workplace, mere-exposure may be that you sit next to your boss's office so that they will always see you as they walk in and out. You may not say a word at all, but just being present in your workplace already puts you at an advantage. Or you walk across the hallway from Marketing to Engineering three times a day where the bathroom is located to find out a month later that all the engineers like you for no apparent reason. That is the mere-exposure effect. Remote workers struggle with exploiting this bias. Due to the nature of telecommuting, they may not expose themselves as much to their bosses or co-workers as in-office employees because they spend that time only when they need to (i.e. meetings). Problems arise when a work culture devalues telecommuting because then there is a negative association with it and those who end up telecommuting are then negatively associated. The mere-exposure effect then works against the employee, leading to lower evaluations in performance reviews, negative feedback from the boss, negative perceptions from co-workers, reduced hours, lower rates of promotions, etc. However, WFH employees can counter any negative associations by exerting effort to build strong working relationships with their bosses, and setting explicit expectations with their teams around their working style, schedule, etc. to leverage mere-exposure to their favor.

Related to mere-exposure, proximity is the idea that the more physically, cognitively, or psychologically closer you are to your target person, the more you both like each other. Consultants suffer greatly from proximity because the nature of their work requires them to travel to their clients constantly, often not spending time in the company office, where their supervisor is most likely located. Also, satellite office employees suffer from proximity when corporate is looking to promote because of "out of mind, out of sight" mentality. In both cases, the employees are physically further from their supervisor and corporate headquarters respectively, leading to lower rates of promotion. Telecommuters are in the same boat when it comes to proximity, but it is worse for them because unlike the consultants and satellite office employees, they may be perceived to make an active choice not to work in the office, which leads to the negative perception that they are not as dedicated to the company, or they do not care for their work. This can lead to pigeon holed roles, a lack of mobility, stagnant pay, replacement by cheaper labor, etc.

Availability heuristic

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where we tend to overvalue information that is most accessible to us. For example, if asked, "do people die more from stomach cancer or car crashes?", most people will respond with car crashes when in reality more people die from stomach cancer because the former is more publicized.

In the workplace, the availability heuristic plays an overwhelming role in performance evaluations and in promotions. Imagine that you are a social media coordinator (an entry-level marketing job), and you have been in your role for about three years. You are up for promotion and the role above you, social media manager, is vacant since the previous person left. The hiring manager narrows down the list to you, and Frank. You use your telecommuting benefit two times a week, and Frank spends all his time in-office. Objectively, you are more productive and work harder than Frank, who spends his time at his desk getting distracted by non-work-related matters. Frank gets promoted. You remain in the entry-level role. This scenario is familiar to many high-performance employees, and it has to do directly with the availability heuristic. In the mind of the hiring manager, they are asking themselves "who is more hard working, you or Frank?" The answer is Frank because of our two biases. The mere-exposure and proximity effects make him more cognitively available to the hiring manager because he spends his time in-office; as Jack and Suzy Welch say Frank is "present and accounted for". The hiring manager is overvaluing this information because even though you work harder, you are "out of sight, out of mind" to that hiring manager.

Closing Thoughts

Work-from-home is an extremely potent benefit for employees when the execution is stellar. Of course, every company and its workforce are unique, but ultimately:

• Companies looking to implement work-from-home must have a culture that is compatible with the policy.
• Founders, executives, and managers must model healthy work-from-home behaviors for employees to know how to use the benefit, or they must explicitly explain define and explain how to use it.
• Employees who do WFH must increase their visibility when at home or suffer from the effects of mere-exposure and proximity effects, and the availability heuristic.
• Employees can increase visibility by preparing thorough, daily reports of what they have accomplished, spend time getting to know their boss and their boss's goals, and setting expectations for their team.

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Kunal is a Digital Darling angel investor, HR professional, career mobility consultant, and writer. He was recognized as a Linkedin Top Voice in 2016. You can follow him on Twitter (@KunalKerai) or send him any wonderful insights you may have to kunal@berkeley.edu.

7/28/17 Added original study sources; 7/26/17 Edited for clarity.

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