It’s long been understood that employees value autonomy extremely highly at work. For instance, research from the University of Melbourne showed that giving employees autonomy over their work results in higher performance levels and greater loyalty towards the employer.

The study centered on a management style known as being ‘autonomously supportive’.  This runs counter to controlling and micro-managing employees and instead encourages and supports them.  It’s largely analogous to the servant leadership that was popularized by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s.

The research found that workers around the world were more likely to be intrinsically motivated when they had autonomy over their work activities, especially if they felt mastery over their tasks and were surrounded by supportive managers, mentors, and peers.

Where we work

Nowhere is this more applicable than in terms of where we work. In Why Managers Matter, Nicholai Foss and Peter Klein explain that autonomy is good up to a point, but a degree of direction still matters at work. A recent study from Cornell suggests the same applies to remote work.

The study shows that employees tend to value remote work when they choose to work remotely, with people not only feeling a greater sense of autonomy and job satisfaction but also lower levels of isolation. Interestingly though, these benefits tend to fade somewhat the more people do it, as though a sense of uniqueness is a factor in its appeal.

The researchers quizzed over 2,100 employees from a health insurance company and found that it’s not enough that people are allowed to work from home, it also matters who initiated the move and how many other people are doing so. The results suggest that flexibility and autonomy are key to making policies work.

“Working from home is not equally effective for everybody,” the researchers explain. “Organizations shouldn’t assume that having people work from home will automatically lead to more positive outcomes.”

Hybrid working

Despite high-profile return-to-office mandates in recent months, hybrid working has become commonplace since the Covid pandemic, with the typical employee now estimated to spend around a third of their working week at home. What’s more, around a quarter of employees are fully remote. The researchers focused on this latter group to understand both the psychological and social factors that influence their lives.

A lot of the research into remote working has assumed that the arrangement is one that employees have chosen. The researchers explain that this isn’t always the case, however.  They conducted a couple of surveys before the pandemic to understand whether fully remote employees had chosen that way of working, whether it had always been the arrangement, and how many of their colleagues had similar arrangements.

The results show that the way in which remote working is initiated matters. For instance, when employees actively chose to work remotely, they had less of a sense of being isolated and a greater sense of autonomy. These, in turn, resulted in higher job satisfaction, as well as higher employee engagement and a lower likelihood of them looking for work elsewhere.

“You get the best of both worlds,” the researchers explain. “If people can choose to work from home, you get a much more positive experience from an employee’s standpoint.”

Feeling special

This sense of agency and autonomy only seemed to exist, however, when employees felt like they were unique in working remotely. The results show that when the number of remote workers increased some strange things happened. Not only did workers not feel like they had as much autonomy, but they also didn’t feel less isolated, despite having more of their colleagues doing as they were.

The researchers don’t have a firm understanding of why this might be, but they hypothesize that it could be because as more employees work remotely, it moves on from being a somewhat ad hoc arrangement and more towards something with firm policies and procedures around remote work.

“That’s a concerning finding for companies, because it suggests that as you scale up working from home, there might be diminishing returns,” the researchers explain. “Some of the utility of these arrangements might wane as they’re adopted en masse.”

They’re at pains to point out that their findings aren’t meant to be taken as an indication that complete autonomy is the way to go and employees should be free to work in a way that suits them, but rather that a degree of flexibility and personalization of people’s work patterns would be beneficial.

“Organizations should focus on how working from home is initiated and be aware that as you adopt these arrangements, you might lose some of the uniqueness—and therefore some of the psychological benefits—that come along with them,” they conclude. “For employees, it matters how you get there, and who else around you is doing it.”