The Real Reason Bosses Want You Back in the Office Full Time (It's Not Productivity)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.htmlThe Real Reason Bosses Want You Back in the Office Full Time (It’s Not Productivity)
June 22, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott
Dr. Grant, a contributing Opinion writer, is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Shandell and Ms. Elliott are Ph.D. candidates there.
When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.
Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.
Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.
...
= new reply since forum marked as read
"IS HE DEAD YET???"
On the other hand, we kind 'a knew that... 
there are a lot of variables.
I know many younger workers benefit from the mentorship opportunities of in-person interactions with seasoned colleagues, which are harder to come by via remote work. And there can be morale benefits from face-to-face communication, as long as your co-workers are good teammates and sane non-assholes.
I spent many years driving miles and miles to sit at a desk in buildings near the neighborhoods where top management lived. (Funny how that works.) In the last few years of my employment, I was on an IT team that was trusted enough to work remotely, which was such a blessing. Of course, it came with downsides, such as often working early, late, and on weekends. But our project rhythms were cyclical, so there were slack periods where I could take a long lunch break, work a shorter day now and then, etc.
But I can definitely confirm the ego part of the phenomenon. One of the Very Important Senior Executives at the corporation where I worked in my late-stage career came to our fair city to address a Town Hall meeting at our regional HQ. Most of us watched the video feed while multitasking, because we were as usual behind the 8-ball on deadlines. Well, we weren’t the only ones, as it turned out, and Mr. Big Shot spoke to a one-third-full auditorium. A bit embarrassing for him, it seems. Oops!
After that day, the edict came down from On High that we would all be expected to drag our butts into a local office an average of three days a week. Now, mind you, my job consisted of working with people around the U.S.A. and in different countries around the world, sometimes in vastly different time zones. (Calls with team members in California, The Netherlands, east coast U.S.A. and India were fun to schedule!)
So on my in-office days, I’d bring my laptop to a drop-in work space in a building in which none of my co-workers were present, so I could get credit for “being in the office,” where I would collaborate with people around the country and the globe.
All to assuage the fragile ego of a VP! 
