Malcolm Gladwell Says Remote Work Is Bad for Employees–and a Lot of People Are Very Mad at Him

Malcolm Gladwell declared last week that remote work is bad–for society, for companies, and for the people doing it. “It’s not in your best interest to work at home,” he explained in an interview for the podcast Diary of a CEO. “I know it’s a hassle to come to the office. But if you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?”

People who work from home don’t feel connected to their companies or that they are part of a team, he continued. “If we don’t feel like we’re part of something important, what’s the point? If it’s just a paycheck, then what have you reduced your life to?”

The negative response to Gladwell’s comments was swift and forceful, and came from many different directions. That isn’t surprising when you consider that 77 percent of employees say they want to work from home. In fact, the critics have a point. Malcolm Gladwell is a brilliant and amazing writer and thinker, but there’s quite a lot wrong with what he says about work from home.

“Horrendously” is not a word I use often, especially not in a heading like the one above, but I just don’t know how else to put it when Gladwell has consistently disdained the idea that he himself might ever have to work in an office. He has said and written–on many occasions–that he does most of his own work either in his apartment or at a rotating list of cafes. In fact, when he published Blink, he included the staff of Soho’s now defunct Savoy restaurant in the acknowledgments. “I wrote a big chunk of my book there,” he explained. He’s on staff at The New Yorker, but according to a 2008 New York Magazine profile, he rarely goes there because of his aversion to Midtown. Instead, his editors “accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking materials,” allowing him to stay comfortably downtown.

Consider his comment, “I know it’s a hassle to come to the office.” This reflects a truly Gladwell-centric view of the world. Perhaps for him it would be nothing more than a hassle–if he ever did it–to get in his Lexus and drive to Midtown, or take a taxi, subway, bus, or limousine. Depending on which he chose, it might take half an hour or so of his time. 

But what if he had small children at home? (Gladwell is childless so apparently had no cause to think about this scenario.) What if, like most people who work in Manhattan, he couldn’t afford housing there and had to live far away, so that the trip between home and the office took two or three hours each way, hours that could more productively be spent working? For a lot of people, having to come to the office is much more than just a hassle, whether Gladwell realizes it or not.

As an accomplished writer and journalist, you’d think Gladwell would have a good command of subtlety and nuance, but any such ability to see the gray areas between extremes was completely lacking in his comments.

For example, there’s what he calls a “core psychological truth” for employees. “We want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary and we wanted you to join our team and if you’re not here it’s really hard to do that.”

Granted, it may be harder to make an employee feel like part of a team if he or she is working from home full-time. But it’s certainly not impossible, as many work from home employees, not to mention fully remote companies, can attest. And physical presence in an office does not automatically create engagement, either. Plenty of on-site employees are disengaged from their jobs and don’t feel part of anything at all.

If he had, he might know that a recent survey by Clockwise found that the employees who feel most engaged with their jobs aren’t the ones who work in the office five days a week. They’re the ones who come in one or two days a week and spend the rest of their time working from home. That means a combination of working in the office and mostly working at home is likely the optimum situation for making employees feel they’re part of a team. But Gladwell doesn’t seem to even consider that option.

During the interview, he seemed to have drawn his conclusions from a sample of one–his audiobook and podcast company Pushkin. At Pushkin, the employees who came to the office least, and those who were hired remotely from other geographic locations, were the most likely to leave, he said. That led him to his conclusion that a work from home employee must equal a non-team member.

He failed to account for any other factors that might influence people to leave, beginning with his own dislike of remote work–for people other than himself–or his own assumption that if you aren’t on site you aren’t really a team member. That last item could have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, another possibility that Gladwell apparently didn’t consider.

The truth is that, yes, it may be harder to make a full-time remote employee feel part of your team than a full-time on-site one. But the solution isn’t to force people to give up remote work. It’s finding ways to bring everyone together so that they feel like they’re part of a group working toward a common goal. That’s something it seems Gladwell hasn’t even tried to do. If you want to be a good leader and a good boss, don’t make the same mistake.