Accurately Interpreting Data to Drive Action Can Be Tricky. Execution Context Matters.

I too often see leaders make expensive decisions about the way people should work based on studies that don't account for context. They don’t reflect whether the flexible work impacts measured result from models that were implemented strategically or if they are remnants of what was cobbled together during the pandemic. The difference is enormous, and it's costing organizations both talent and competitive advantage. Here's how some research that’s made the rounds recently ignored that contextual difference, and why the conclusions drawn, if followed, could set an organization back instead of moving it forward.

The two articles that landed in my inbox most recently and made me cringe include The Economist’s “Does working from home kill company culture,” and The Wall Street Journal’s, “In America’s return to the office, women are falling behind.” In both cases, the research cited fails to account for how the flexibility being critiqued was actually implemented. As a result, the findings come to oversimplified conclusions that create more confusion rather than help leaders figure out what works.

Let's dig in.

Here We Go Again...

We'll start with the article in The Economist, “Does working from home kill company culture?” I have MANY thoughts about their attempt to assess the cultural "agility" of remote work versus a 5-Day RTO mandate but I will focus on the following.

You can't accurately compare the difference unless that flexible work model was executed with actual strategic intention as part of reimagining how the business operates. My guess? Very few organizations in the research sample fit that bill. When you don't control for whether flexible work was implemented well, you're basically comparing apples to oranges—and that's not helpful to anyone trying to make real decisions.

The Microsoft study they cited is a perfect example. Of course 61,000 employees working remotely during the first half of 2020 became more "siloed" and less "dynamic." That was a crisis-driven execution during a global pandemic, not intentional, performance-driven flexibility. When you don't lay the systemic foundation to work effectively across places, spaces and time, then yes, agility is going to suffer.

What really made me shake my head was how the article incorrectly claimed that NVIDIA requires employees in the office five days a week. According to Fortune, NVIDIA actually has a robust flexible work model where teams determine where, when and how they work best. So that leaves Tesla and SpaceX as their examples of five-day office "agility"—enough said.

What the Data Actually Tells Us

Now, I did appreciate their reference to my friend Mark Ma's research on return-to-office mandates. His work shows that RTO mandates caused job satisfaction to fall and turnover to rise. But here's what's even more interesting for Boards, especially: companies that introduced four- or five-day RTO mandates actually underperformed their peers in the stock market.

This lines up perfectly with Alex Edmans' research that I've been talking about for years. His findings show that employee satisfaction improves corporate performance rather than just being expensive "feel-good" spending. It actually creates real shareholder value through better business outcomes.

Whether it's correlation or causation, the point is clear: employee satisfaction matters to performance. It's a driver that smart leaders consider when they're trying to leverage talent to execute their strategic priorities. The data consistently show that employees want and expect some degree of flexibility in how, when and where they work, and many are willing to take a pay cut to get it.

So the real question should be, “what does good implementation look like, and how do you design a flexible work model that meets business needs while supporting everyone on your team?”

Don't Fall Into the Gender Trap

This brings us to The Wall Street Journal article, “In America’s return to the office, women are falling behind,” that made me go back to a piece I wrote for Forbes back in 2011 because I couldn’t believe we were, once again, falling into the trap of making flexibility a "women's issue."

As I said more than a decade ago: flexibility is an issue for women, but it's not a women's issue.

That nuance matters because when you make it a women's issue, you let the organization off the hook from doing the real work of creating a flexible work model that achieves business results and supports ALL people. (Yup, I said that in 2011, and it's still true today.)

The WSJ cited recent Labor Department research showing 36% of women versus 29% of men did "any amount of work from home on a given day." But look at that number again—that's still 29% of men, not zero. So instead of focusing on the gender difference, shouldn't we be asking how organizations can optimize the way nearly 1/3 of workers do their jobs flexibly?

Here's where it gets interesting. When we asked a national probability sample of U.S. workers "Where do you do most of your work?" in 2023, one-third said "from a remote location, that includes a business center, home or some other location” (not JUST home), the majority of those remote workers were actually men. Change how you frame the question, and suddenly the gender story flips entirely.

What about the research cited in the article showing women who work remotely get less feedback and development? That's an important issue, but here's what most people miss with that study: that was happening before COVID within teams in different buildings on the same corporate campus. The shift to fully remote in the pandemic made it worse. When they were all technically "in the office," the women were still experiencing the same management problems. This isn't about women working from home. It's about managers who need better training on how to lead flexible teams that include women, period.

What Actually Works: Context and Execution

The real issue isn't whether flexibility is "good" or "bad.” The reality is it’s here to stay and it’s not going away. This is about what makes sense for a specific business and job. As one of the commenters on my LinkedIn post about The Economist article said, "You probably don't want your sales team stuck in the office all day, but you also don't want firefighters working from their kitchen table." Exactly! That means understanding what work needs to happen and THEN where, when, and how it’s done best. And designing your approach accordingly.

The reality is most flexible work today is happening on top of what I call the phantom post-COVID wreckage of the old work model. Those five-day, return-to-office mandates? They're attempts to go back to something that doesn't exist anymore, and they fall short in areas that really matter for long-term success and true agility: work+life fit, honest communication, culture, and good leadership.

Instead of trying to go backward, what if organizations used their current challenges to actually optimize the flexible way work will get done, now and next?

The Real Opportunity

Both articles reinforce the kind of oversimplified thinking that keeps us stuck in unproductive debates—office versus remote, men versus women, or agility versus flexibility. When the research and articles don't account for good execution, and keep reinforcing these false choices, they actually make it harder for organizations to do the strategic workplace transformation they need to do. The question isn't whether flexibility works. The question is whether you're willing to invest the time and effort to make it work well.

Start here…

Audit Your Current Reality: Before you make any decisions based on research, take an honest look at how the place, space or time flexibility that currently exists in your organization was actually implemented. Were the systemic and cultural supports set with strategic intention, or were they crisis-driven during the pandemic? If it's the latter, then you can't accurately measure whether the flexible way people work today is effective. Use this accurate interpretation of current state as the baseline and align your leadership team behind a plan to achieve a future state of flexible work success that is meaningful and real.

What are you seeing in your organization? Are you building strategic flexibility or still managing around models that were thrown together during the pandemic? I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we move past these debates and into real work transformation.

Cali Williams Yost, Founder & CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group, is one of the leading authorities on high-performance work flexibility. For three decades, she has helped organizations from banks to hospitals to universities drive performance and well-being by reimagining how, when, and where work is done, with strategic intention. She is the author of two books on the subject, and her media credits include the Today Show, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Marketplace, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Harvard Business Review.