A few years ago I became convinced that the people who worked for me should work from home more. I was influenced in this by the work of Nassim Taleb, who argues that a high degree of variation may be better than monotonous pursuit of a supposedly optimal average. This led me to think it might be better to partition work into periods of high sociability interspersed with days of self--seclusion, as an alternative to the neither-fish-nor-fowl halfway-house of the open-plan office.

What I discovered was that it is not enough to ‘allow’ people to work remotely. You must actively encourage it. If remote working is merely ‘allowed’, it is perceived as a concession and people feel they are burning reputational capital whenever they take up the option. Only active evangelism normalises the behaviour.

I use ‘evangelism’ deliberately here. A glance at history shows that a huge number of socially beneficial behaviours have spread not in response to coercive legislation but by norm-setting, whether led by royalty or religion.