When I talk to various companies I am always intrigued by how they view working at home.  Some organizations readily embrace flexible hours and work from home.  But others treat working from home as evil.  As if the worst thing someone could do is spend time in comfort at their house (or apartment, or coffee shop, or, well you get the idea).

The argument against working from home tends to revolve around “building relationships” and “being seen” at the office.  Both of these are good things, and work-from-home proponents tend to gloss over how important they are.  But a lot of times the underlying current of work-from-home-is-evil is an issue of control.

The organization wants to know what their employees are doing at all times.  It doesn’t surprise me that as we install more and more cameras in buildings and on roads we find we are less trusting of our employees.

While issues of trust run deep and can’t be solved in a 300 word post, let me propose a question: is it better to mistrust your employees so that they don’t get any work done while in your building?  Or should you give them the benefit of the doubt and let them work?

In a world driven by intrinsic motivation, external sources of motivation become less and less effective.    When your job is to create something out of nothing, how does having your boss stand over your shoulder improve your productivity?  Does punching into a time clock make you more effective?

Of course it doesn’t!  In fact, it actually undermines our productivity.

Times have changed, yet how we are “motivated” in the workplace remains the same.  Almost all of us work on a “project” basis.  But we are still judged for hours worked and not quality worked.

As we move into the next decade of work (one where the news repeatedly says we won’t recover all the jobs lost in this current recession), companies are going to need to look at getting more productivity out of less people.  While this will be a challenge for organizations and workers alike, I can guarantee you one way to destroy productivity is to prevent people from working at home.

At some point we need to learn to trust our employees.  Because if you can’t trust your employees to work from home, you probably can’t trust them to work at the office.  And if you have so little trust in your employees, that tells me one of two things:  You either have the wrong people working for you.  Or your management style is destroying their productivity in the first place.

photo provided by flickr user wetsun