Don’t Assume You Know How People Feel about Remote Work

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Published on: May 12, 2025 at 7:48 pm

Just because you might prefer to work in the office doesn’t mean everyone else does. Many talented, dedicated employees need the flexibility of a remote or hybrid work schedule, or are simply more productive when working from home.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Annals article on the “subjective” experience of time, including its impact on work schedules, with Karen Jansen of North Carolina State University, said that she has had conversations with many senior executives about this topic.

“Those of us who are more advanced in our careers, we had jobs where you worked at the office five days a week, and so it can be very hard if you’re not as productive at home—it’s hard for you to assume that anybody else is,” Shipp said. “We tend to project.

“I had this conversation with a person who said, ‘I just don’t believe people can be productive from home; I know when I’m at home, I’m playing with the dog, or I put in a load of laundry,’ and I said, ‘That’s really interesting, because I feel like when I work from home, I’m so productive; I get to put in a load of laundry, and that refreshes me, and then I come back and I’m working double time, and I’m not interrupted,’” she said. “And they said, ‘Oh, I think interruptions at work are great,’ so we uncovered some of our two different assumptions.

“That person really wanted their office workers to come back Monday through Friday, eight to five—‘That’s the way it should be; nobody could be productive from home,’ whereas I’m thinking, ‘How could you not be productive from home? It’s the perfect environment.’”

Shipp said she also discussed corporate-level policies that work for both the company and all its employees.

“One of the things this leader and I talked about was pushing those decisions down to the department level, and then within departments, really coaching leaders on how to communicate with their employees in ways that are open-minded,” Shipp said. “Enabling a leader to customize work schedules while still allowing coordination—that’s not easy.

“But the first thing you have to do is surface the assumptions, find out what people want and need, and then have the discussion about, ‘How can we meet your needs as the individual, even when the team needs to coordinate?’” she said.

A sample of Shipp’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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