When Lord Rose, former chief executive of M&S and former chairman of Asda, recently claimed that working from home isn’t ‘proper work’ and contributes to the ‘general decline’ of the UK’s economy, he sparked immediate pushback from remote workers. While he didn’t explicitly call them lazy, his suggestion that they’re not doing ‘proper work’ made remote workers feel the need to publicly defend themselves against perceived accusations of laziness. This reaction reveals how quickly discussions about remote work become entangled with assumptions about laziness.
Laziness and Effort
I believe that the debate about remote work reveals fundamental misconceptions about what laziness really means. When we label someone as lazy—a criticism that can have severe consequences for an individual’s career and wellbeing—we should at least be clear about what we mean. My research suggests that laziness typically involves ‘unjustified suboptimal effort’; someone is lazy when they could and should exert more effort to achieve a goal, but they don’t.
This seemingly simple definition raises deeper questions about how we value effort. We often assume that more effort is always better—that the harder someone works, the more praiseworthy their behaviour. But this is a mistake. What matters most isn’t how much effort we expend, but whether that effort is directed efficiently toward goals one considers worthwhile. Misdirected effort may amount to procrastination and ‘busywork’, neither of which are typically conducive to productivity.
Of course, more effort does sometimes lead to greater productivity. But there are many valid reasons why people might put in less effort—or less apparent effort—than others. Physical limitations like chronic illness are obvious reasons why someone might need to work remotely. But there are other, less visible reasons for limiting the effort one exerts. Take John Von Neumann, who made major contributions to various scientific fields. His best friend called him lazy because he’d often move on to easier problems, rather than persisting with the difficult ones. If Von Neumann didn’t have a good justification for this choice, he might indeed have done his work lazily, but perhaps he did have a good justification: perhaps it was an energy preserving strategy for sustained contribution to the field, or a way to avoid boredom to sustain long-term motivation. If that was the case, his lower effort was justified and not lazy. Other reasons for limiting one’s efforts are, for example, ensuring work is compatible with other responsibilities one deems important (e.g. caring responsibilities), or the need to create space to enable creative thinking.
A further problem is that traditional markers of effort—like office presence or hours logged—are unreliable and risk valuing struggle over well-directed effort. Someone might appear to be working harder by spending long hours in the office, while actually achieving less than someone who works remotely in focused bursts. The important question isn’t how effort looks, but whether it effectively serves the goal one believes to be worthwhile.
Enabling workers to direct their effort effectively
Instead of asking whether remote workers are lazy, we should ask whether, and how, different working arrangements enable people to direct their effort more effectively to the right goal.
For example, a recent large study of working-from-home professionals suggests that young employees often benefit from more office time for mentoring opportunities, but that other workers contribute just as effectively—or even more so—when given flexibility. [Bloom, N., Han, R. & Liang, J. Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. [Nature 630, 920–925 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2 ]
Instead of ‘hunting’ for laziness or enforcing particular work arrangements, we should focus on creating conditions where people, given their circumstances and abilities, can optimally direct their effort. This means developing flexible policies that recognise different people need different environments to make valuable contributions. It also means that we should be much more careful when claiming (or implying) that certain people are lazy. This is a complex matter to determine and getting it wrong can have serious consequences for individuals and organisations.
We should also ask what the fact about so many remote workes tells about our society. E. g. if we need so much bureaucracy and legal provisions that allows this kind of remote work. Or that we gradually leave the principle of meritoriousness and give more and more space for the individual emotions that are unstable and unpredictable. Let us talk about Plato and his reflections about the reasons why democracy declines and changes into tyranny.