Working From Home Is Not a Switch
Sending employees home does not simply relocate the office. It changes the system through which work gets done.
In 2020, organisations around the world made a remarkably large operational decision in a remarkably short time.
Employees were told not to come to the office. They were given laptops, access to company systems, video-conferencing software, and—where possible—an allowance for internet or equipment. Then they were told to continue working.
The underlying assumption seemed obvious: the employee was the same person, doing the same job, for the same employer. Only the location had changed.
But was that really true?
If working from home is simply office work performed at home, then performance should remain broadly unchanged. Some might even expect productivity to rise: there is no commuting time, fewer office interruptions, and greater flexibility.
Yet the reality was mixed. Some employees thrived. Some teams became more productive. Others experienced communication delays, longer working hours, weaker collaboration, slower decisions, isolation, and burnout.
The reason is simple, but easily overlooked:
Working from home is not a switch. It is an organisational redesign.
The office was doing more work than we realised
When people think about an office, they often picture physical assets: desks, meeting rooms, printers, coffee machines, and parking spaces.
But an office also provides something less visible: coordination infrastructure.
Consider a typical working day. A junior analyst overhears a senior colleague explain a difficult issue. A manager notices that a team member is confused and provides quick feedback. Two colleagues resolve a minor question in three minutes while walking past each other. A team informally agrees on who will make a decision. A new employee learns how things are actually done—not from a policy document, but by observing the team.
None of these activities may appear in a job description. Yet they are part of how organisations produce results.
When work moves home, these invisible systems do not automatically follow. The employee may still have a laptop, but the work environment has changed in more fundamental ways:
- Small questions can become long email or chat exchanges.
- Informal knowledge becomes harder to access.
- Managers lose visual signals they once used—rightly or wrongly—to judge whether work is progressing.
- Junior staff have fewer opportunities to observe experienced colleagues.
- Employees may struggle to separate work time from personal time.
- Team members may become more productive individually while becoming less effective collectively.
The office, in other words, was never just a building. It was part of the organisation’s operating system.
A simple thought experiment
Imagine two teams.
The first team performs structured and largely independent work. Each person analyses data, prepares reports, processes transactions, writes code, or reconciles accounts. Their outputs can be measured clearly, and they need relatively few real-time decisions from colleagues.
The second team performs ambiguous and highly interdependent work. It handles client escalations, trains new employees, makes investment decisions, develops strategy, manages exceptions, and coordinates between multiple departments.
Both teams are sent home. Both receive the same laptops, internet access, and communication tools.
Will their productivity change in the same way?
Probably not.
The first team may benefit from fewer interruptions, more control over working hours, and the removal of commuting time. The second team may find that work becomes slower and more frustrating because it depends on rapid clarification, trust, informal knowledge sharing, and timely decisions.
This is why asking whether “working from home improves productivity” is often the wrong question.
The better question is:
For which tasks, people, and organisations does remote work improve performance—and under what conditions?
Research supports this more nuanced view. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that the productivity effects of remote work depend on several factors, including the nature of employees’ tasks. A study of knowledge workers during pandemic-era remote work found that employees worked longer hours but that output declined, with increased communication and coordination costs among the possible explanations.
That does not prove that working from home reduces productivity. It shows that moving work out of the office without changing the way work is managed can create hidden costs.
The economics of coordination
An organisation is not simply a group of individuals working separately. It is a system for coordinating specialised people, information, decisions, and resources.
This coordination has a cost.
In an office, some of that cost is reduced by physical proximity. People can ask questions quickly, observe each other’s work, build trust informally, and resolve uncertainty before it becomes a larger problem.
Remote work can reduce certain costs while increasing others.
| Type of work | Potential advantage of WFH | Potential challenge of WFH |
| Individual, focused work | Fewer interruptions and no commuting time | Isolation and blurred work-life boundaries |
| Routine, measurable work | Clearer output tracking and more autonomy | Weak engagement if work becomes overly monitored |
| Collaborative work | Digital records and wider access to talent | Slower clarification and more meetings |
| Creative or strategic work | More uninterrupted time for thinking | Fewer spontaneous exchanges and weaker idea-sharing |
| Training and onboarding | Access to digital learning materials | Less observation, mentoring, and tacit learning |
| Client-facing or exception-based work | Flexible access and digital service channels | Delays when issues require rapid cross-functional judgment |
The important distinction is between individual productivity and team productivity.
An employee may produce more work alone at home because they have fewer distractions. But the wider team may still perform worse if decisions take longer, misunderstandings increase, new staff are slower to develop, or problems escalate before anyone notices them.
A firm can therefore make the mistake of measuring the wrong thing. It may see employees online for longer hours and assume productivity has increased. But online presence is not output. Longer hours may instead signal unclear expectations, excessive meetings, poor systems, or work that has spilled into personal time.
This is one reason remote management must shift from monitoring activity to managing outcomes.
The Malaysian reality
The phrase “working from home” can make the arrangement sound more uniform than it really is.
In practice, remote work is experienced very differently by different employees.
One employee may have a dedicated workspace, stable fibre internet, quiet surroundings, flexible working hours, and a manager who evaluates work based on clear outcomes. Another may share a limited space with family members, manage caregiving responsibilities, rely on inconsistent connectivity, and work for a manager who equates responsiveness with commitment.
Both may technically be “working from home.” But they are not working under the same conditions.
This matters in Malaysia, where access to suitable workspace, technology, connectivity, and household support can differ considerably across employees and locations. A Malaysia-based corporate study found that technology availability was significantly associated with remote-work productivity, while employee wellbeing also had a strong relationship with productivity.
The lesson is straightforward: providing a laptop is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
A remote-work policy that ignores employees’ actual working conditions may unintentionally reward those with better home infrastructure while penalising those without it.
Remote work requires redesign
Working from home can be highly effective. But it works best when organisations deliberately redesign the way work happens.
That redesign usually involves several changes.
First, organisations need clearer definitions of output. Employees should know what is expected, how quality will be assessed, when work is due, and who has authority to make decisions.
Second, teams need better documentation. In an office, people can rely heavily on memory, informal conversation, and “asking someone who knows.” In a distributed environment, decisions, processes, and responsibilities need to be easier to find and understand.
Third, managers need to become better at managing outcomes rather than visibility. The question should not be “Was this person online at 9.00 a.m.?” It should be “Did the team deliver the agreed result at the expected standard, while maintaining sustainable workloads?”
Fourth, organisations need to rethink learning and mentoring. New employees cannot learn everything through formal training modules. They also learn through observation, feedback, informal conversation, and exposure to how experienced colleagues think. Remote organisations must create these opportunities intentionally.
Finally, companies need to distinguish between work that genuinely benefits from being together and work that does not. A thoughtful hybrid model is not simply a compromise between office and home. It should allocate different locations to different types of work.
The real question
The debate about working from home is often framed too simply.
One side says remote work improves productivity because people save commuting time and gain flexibility. The other says people become distracted, disconnected, or difficult to supervise.
Both can be true.
The outcome depends less on whether employees work at home or in an office, and more on whether the organisation understands the nature of the work itself.
Working from home is not a switch because work is not merely individual effort performed at a particular location. Work is a coordinated production system. It depends on information flows, trust, tools, decision rights, management practices, learning, and human wellbeing.
When the workplace changes, those systems must change too.
Before declaring a role remote-ready, an organisation should ask:
- Can the role’s outputs be clearly defined and measured?
- Which tasks require rapid informal collaboration?
- Are decision rights and responsibilities clear?
- Can employees access the tools, information, and support they need?
- How will junior employees learn from experienced colleagues?
- Are managers assessing outcomes rather than online visibility?
- Does each employee have a workable home environment?
- Which activities truly require people to be physically together?
The goal should not be to prove that working from home is better or worse than working in an office.
The goal should be to design work so that people—and the organisation—can perform well wherever the work is done.