The real cost of ignoring evidence when flexibility is working.
We built D-Cyfr around a simple conviction: trust is not a perk. It’s the architecture.
Our team works across time zones and different rhythms of life. What holds us together isn’t a shared office — it’s a shared standard and the kind of dialogue that requires you to think before you speak. Turns out the data agrees with us.
A new New York Times opinion essay by Wharton’s Adam Grant and two Ph.D. researchers spent six
years studying why leaders resist remote and hybrid work. They surveyed thousands of executives
across a host of personality traits. Trust in employees didn’t predict Return to Office (RTO) stances.
Collaboration values didn’t either.
The only trait that consistently predicted opposition to remote work was narcissism.
They validated this among Fortune 500 CEOs using proxies from prior academic literature: pay package size, signature size, prominence of executive photos in company reports. The higher the score, the more negative the public statements about remote work. They even ran an experiment priming leaders to think about the bold ego behind Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Those leaders became measurably more likely to oppose remote work. That’s not correlation. It’s causal.
What the same research shows RTO mandates actually produce: no improvement in financial returns. Star employees quit. Satisfaction drops. New talent goes elsewhere. Meanwhile, hybrid models reduce turnover by a third with no performance cost and often a productivity gain.
What works: anchor days for coordination, intensity over frequency (Atlassian’s quarterly gatherings outperform daily attendance for connection), flexibility tailored to the work and the people, particularly important for retaining women and giving people control over when they work, which makes them far more willing to accept direction on where.
At D-Cyfr, part of what we do is help clients translate evidence like this into workforce decisions that are actually defensible. There’s a real difference between a policy built around what your business needs and one built around what makes you feel in command.
Full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gt7PJzDg
A few questions worth sitting with:
Can you name the specific outcome your RTO policy was designed to improve, and are you measuring whether it’s working?
If your best people could move tomorrow to a competitor offering more flexibility and the same pay, how many would?
Is your position on this based on evidence from your own organisation, or on assumptions that haven’t been interrogated since 2019?
And if the research showed definitively your policy is costing you talent with no financial return, would you change it, or find a reason not to?
Written by Warwick Absolon, Managing Director at D-Cyfr Consulting.