Where You Work Matters Less Than Who Knows You There

In Fast Company, Arizona State University researcher Christos Makridis cuts through one of the loudest arguments in business. In Why a good boss matters more than working from home, republished from The Conversation, he shares research he did with Georgetown's Jason Schloetzer, published in Management Science. They studied nearly 165,000 U.S. employees at more than 73,000 firms from 2020 to 2023. Remote workers looked more satisfied at first. Once the researchers accounted for pay, occupation and how people were treated at work, that advantage largely disappeared.

What did matter were the long-standing basics: feeling appreciated, trusting management, communicating well, believing pay was fair and having a good relationship with your direct manager. That last one was tied to higher satisfaction in every work arrangement, and most strongly for people working on-site.

We Have Been Arguing About the Container

For five years, leaders and employees have argued about location as if location were the job. Mandates get announced, people push back, policies get revised, and both sides treat days in the building as the measure of commitment or freedom. The research suggests we have been debating the container while ignoring what is inside it.

Makridis points out that a return to the office means different things to different people. A trainee may welcome it because the people who can teach her are finally nearby. Someone doing deep, focused work may lose the quiet hours that made him productive. An employee with a difficult manager may simply lose the distance that protected her. The study found that pattern too. Remote arrangements lifted satisfaction most for roles needing less real-time collaboration and for people with weaker manager relationships.

That last finding deserves a second read. For some employees, working from home is more than a preference. It is a way to put distance between themselves and a leader who doesn't know them. When we treat flexibility as the prize, we can miss that it is sometimes a workaround for a relationship that never worked.

One Policy, Many People

A single location policy is a form of standardization, and standardization has real value. Clear expectations about when teams overlap, how decisions get made and where newcomers can find help give everyone a dependable floor. Companies need that consistency to run well. The trouble starts when the policy is asked to do work only a manager can do.

No policy can tell you that one person learns best beside a colleague while another does her best thinking at 6 a.m. at her kitchen table. No policy notices that a strong performer has gone quiet. Only someone who knows the person can make those calls, and this research says that relationship carries more weight than the address. In my work with organizations, I encourage leaders to start there. Before redesigning where work happens, find out whether each person is truly known by the leader responsible for them.

Trust data shows why this matters now. Edelman's 2026 Trust at Work study found trust in direct managers fell from 79% to 72% in two years, a record low, as I discussed in Transformation Is Happening to Your People, Not With Them. A mandate will not rebuild that trust. Leaders who take the time to know their people will.

Make Time Together Worth the Commute

Makridis offers a practical starting point I agree with. Before requiring time together, identify what people actually gain from it and organize the time around that. Teams that depend on collaboration need overlapping hours. New employees need access to people who can teach them. Everyone needs regular, useful feedback, wherever they sit.

Three moves for this week:

Ask each person on your team one question: what do you need from me that you're not getting? Listen for the answer behind the answer. A request for more remote days might really be a request for fewer interruptions, clearer priorities or a manager who listens.

Audit your in-office days. If people commute in to sit on video calls, attendance isn't your problem. Redesign one day around the work that benefits from being in the same room, such as mentoring, problem solving or onboarding.

Put a short weekly check-in on the calendar with each direct report. Use it to learn what they are working toward, not only what they finished. The goal is to know each person well enough to notice when something changes.

I made a related case in Recompose the Role Around the Person, Not Just the Work. The same principle applies to place. Design around the people you lead, and the right arrangement becomes far easier to find, because you will know who needs what and why.

The office debate will keep going. The leaders who come out ahead won't be the ones with the strictest policy or the most generous one. They will be the ones whose people feel known on an ordinary Tuesday, whether they are at a desk downtown or a kitchen table across the country.

People rarely stay for the location. They stay for the leader who knows who they are and what they are becoming.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.