‘This isn't about ‘bums in seats’ anymore’: Canadian researcher explains why remote work is a competitive advantage, and RTO is hiding failure in leadership
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that employees at younger firms and working for younger CEOs are working from home more often than those in older organizations.
The economists document how work-from-home patterns vary by firm age, CEO age and employment type in the United States. The authors report that employees work from home more often at younger firms – almost twice as often at firms founded after 2015 than at firms founded before 1990.
They add that younger firms founded around 2020 remain among the most remote-friendly.
For Leda Stawnychko, associate professor of strategy and organizational theory at Mount Royal University, the key lesson for employers isn’t so much about generational preferences, but more about “organizational capacity.”
From ‘bums in seats’ to outcomes and skills
The NBER authors note that remote work has “high amenity value to many workers” and that its rise has reshaped commuting, time use and location choices, with wide implications for worker welfare.
“This isn't about ‘bums in seats’ anymore,” Stawnychko says, explaining that many leaders were never trained to set clear expectations, give effective feedback or measure outputs, so they relied on seeing people at their desks as a signal of contribution.
Employees have always slacked off on the job from time to time, regardless of where they worked – she says that a focus on physical presence is just a way to avoid addressing real management accountability.
Essentially, the challenge for Canadian employers is not about “allowing” remote work, but if their leadership and management practices are equipped to handle it when they do.
Regardless of the age of the CEO or the firm, Stawnychko says, organizations that have accepted hybrid work models and allow remote work where possible are likely to come out ahead in the competition for talent.
“It's always supply and demand, and people with the skills that are needed in the workplace are always going to have more power as to how they want to work,” she says.
“You cannot force somebody highly skilled to go to the office five days a week if they don't want to. They’ll just take a job somewhere else.”
Equity, job design and the risk of a two-tier workplace
While she admits that some jobs must be done in person, Stawnychko stresses that many employers are still relying on habit and optics rather than reality when they set hybrid policies, creating inequities between those who can choose their own style of work, and those who can’t.
This is particularly relevant when considering employees with disabilities and women and others with caregiving duties, for whom remote work has created accessibility which return-to-office mandates threaten.
Knowledge workers in tech, professional services and corporate may secure flexible arrangements, while employees in customer-facing or operational roles see little change in their day-to-day reality, Stawnychko details; over time, that can impact morale and retention.
She recommends an audit of the company’s flexibility practices, to gauge who is working remotely, who is being denied access to flexible work, and why, “to understand if there are patterns, and if the patterns are connecting to gender, or disability, or caregiving or maybe executive levels.”
She adds that employers should normalize transparency around which positions require physical presence and why, and performance expectations based on actual needs of the role: “Outputs, not bums on seats.”
