And this, in a nutshell, is why I don’t work in a law firm any longer, if I’m being honest:

But when you hire someone, you inherently are trusting them. And then literally that trust is blown up in five seconds by “You must follow these processes” and “Sit in this chair in this specific location.” Like, hey buddy, I thought you trusted me? So if I’m on top of a mountain in Idaho and I’m getting work done, that’s not good enough? And hey, you got an out clause too — if I’m not getting work done, you can fire me. Right?

Trust in the workplace is not a rosy picture, and that’s the real reason work-from-home, work-from-anywhere stuff doesn’t really, well, “work” or scale. It’s because no one trusts that you’ll actually do your stuff if they can’t see you — even though the grand irony is that often when they are seeing you, you’re on Facebook.

Look, the truth of the matter is, technical work in law firms is either getting done, or not getting done, and there are really obvious ways to tell the difference that don’t involve the person doing that work being in your eyesight all day. Besides, someone sitting at desk surfing Facebook will end up looking an awful lot like someone processing data for review. Unless you are sitting there watching their screen, there’s no real difference, but you don’t sit there watching their screen because you can just check to make sure the work got done instead of being quite that creepy.

So why do they need to sit in that location? Why can’t they be at home? Why can’t they be anywhere with an internet connection? The work will still either get done, or it won’t.

And, as pointed out in the article below, if it doesn’t get done, then you hired the wrong person, regardless of where they are.

Isn’t a better work-anywhere policy just basic common sense?