ADAM GRANT, MARISSA SHANDELL, COURTNEY ELLIOTT2026年7月1日 JooHee YoonWhen the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.疫情结束后，许多曾居家办公的员工以为，自己至少可以每周保留几天的远程工作安排。然而时至今日，美国有三分之一的公司已强制所有员工全面返岗，并禁止了远程和混合办公模式。Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.一些管理者声称，坚持全面到岗是为了提升工作效率——尽管有明确的证据表明它并不能。还有人宣称这关乎协作、创造力或企业文化。我们最新的研究揭示，反对任何形式的居家办公更可能完全是由另一种因素驱动：自负。Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.具体到个别情况，团队面对面工作或许确实有充分理由。但总体而言，命令员工全职回办公室实际上是一种权力和地位的展示。这是那些具有自恋人格特质的领导者惯用的典型策略。他们把任何形式的远程办公都视为对自己权威和受人崇拜地位的威胁。他们渴望在办公室里被奉为神明。Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.过去六年里，我们一直在研究，为什么有些领导者继续支持远程办公，另一些人则坚决反对。我们对数千名高管、中层经理和基层主管的各种人格特质展开了调查。后来，当我们询问他们对混合办公和远程办公的态度时，他们的答案与其对员工的信任程度、对人际往来的偏好程度均无明显相关。唯一能够持续预测其反对远程办公的特质是自恋——即以自我为中心、自以为是的倾向。领导者对自己的评价越高，他们就越渴望权力和地位，也越支持强制返岗令。That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.这一规律同样适用于《财富》500强企业的首席执行官群体。由于无法直接测定他们的自我膨胀程度，我们转而衡量此前众多研究已确认为自恋可靠替代指标的若干因素：薪酬水平、公司年报中的签名大小和照片大小。（当然，首席执行官未必会亲自过问版式设计，但下属必须揣摩上意，弄清什么能让老板满意。）拿着远超常人的薪酬、塑造远超常人的形象，传递的是一种直接来自《王牌播报员》主角罗恩·勃艮第式的信号：我可是个大人物。我们发现，首席执行官在这一指数上的得分越高，就越倾向于通过兼任本公司董事长、加入其他公司董事会等方式来谋求权力与地位，而在疫情最初两年里，对远程和混合办公发表负面言论最多的也是这些人。The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.自恋型人格特质与要求员工全职到岗之间的关联绝非偶然，而是一种因果关系。在一项实验中，我们引导管理者思考，史蒂夫·乔布斯在苹果、拉里·埃里森在甲骨文担任首席执行官时，强势张扬的自我在其成功中所起到的作用。参与这一练习之后，这些管理者反对远程办公的倾向明显上升。None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.这并非说每个拒绝远程工作的领导者都是自大狂。影响工作场所灵活政策的因素有很多。但我们的数据确实表明，总体而言，自我中心的领导者很难接受员工可以自主选择工作地点这一想法。心理学家早已指出，自恋就像毒品——让人渴望源源不断的关注和认可。而远程工作恰恰切断了领导者获得这种“供给”的途径。When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.当员工不在办公室时，领导者更难发号施令和实施控制。他们无法站在格子间旁边施压，也无法通过摔门来震慑别人；他们无法通过把人召集到会议室、拍桌子来彰显权威；甚至连用眼神盯着别人施压的机会都没有了。Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.远程办公也让领导者无法沉浸在员工的敬仰之中。他们不再是角落办公室里最显眼的人物，而是屏幕上一排平等小方框中的一个。在线上，他们得到的不是全神贯注的倾听，而是倦态、疲惫，以及来自伴侣、孩子和宠物的打扰。他们得到的不是即时的满足感，而是卡顿的表情和延迟的回复。员工在Slack上的阿谀奉承效果终究比不上面对面的恭维。Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.自我中心的领导者往往会通过进一步收紧控制来应对这些威胁。他们宣称，员工在家是在“偷懒”，而不是“居家办公”。他们威胁要解雇那些不是每天到岗的人。Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.大量严谨的证据表明，强迫员工每天回办公室会适得其反。对450多家公司和300多万名员工的研究显示，返岗令并不能提高财务回报。它只会促使明星员工离职、降低留任员工的满意度，并吓退新人才加入。在科技公司和非营利组织所做的实验表明，允许员工每周有一部分时间居家办公可以提高幸福感，并将离职率降低三分之一，而且不会损害绩效。在许多情况下，这些员工甚至完成了更多工作，因为他们不用花时间通勤，也不会被办公室里的各种干扰分心。There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.灵活办公政策的益处也是有限度的。研究表明，每周居家办公超过一半时间可能导致社交隔离——难以建立人际联结和培育企业文化。同时，促进创意碰撞、非正式学习和师徒指导也变得更加困难。但实现这些目标并不需要每周五天都在办公室。事实上，研究发现，当人们每周有部分时间居家办公时，协作与创造力反而达到最佳状态——他们可以用一两天的居家办公专注于深度个人工作，将其余时间留给沟通与集体解决问题。大量研究也已充分证明，过度的集体性相处容易滋生群体思维（更不用说病菌传播）。适度保持距离反而能激发更具创新性的想法，促成更明智的决策。Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar. Evidence supports a few basic guidelines.混合办公对领导者确实提出了新的挑战。通过录制的视频传递鼓舞人心的信息、在数字白板上主持头脑风暴都不是什么轻松的事。但如果想在一个日益灵活的世界中保持竞争优势，领导者就必须放下自我，学会远程管理的艺术。证据支持以下几条基本原则。One: Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people. At Microsoft, new hires who spent at least a couple of days a month with their manager and their teams were more satisfied with their early experiences, which in turn meant they were more likely to stay over the next year and a half.第一，协调很重要。团队需要设定“共同到岗日”，尤其对于欢迎新员工和指导初级员工至关重要。在微软，入职初期每月至少与直属上司和团队共处几天的新员工，对早期工作体验的满意度更高，进而在接下来一年半内更倾向于留任。Two: Intensity beats frequency. The software company Atlassian has found that spending a few days with your team at a well-designed quarterly team gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily schleps to the office.第二，强度胜于频率。软件公司Atlassian发现，相比每天辛苦通勤到办公室，与团队一起参加经过精心设计的季度聚会、共处几天更能增强联系感和归属感。Three: Hybrid work is not one-size-fits-all. Different jobs require different amounts of time in person. So do different people; for example, flexibility proves particularly important in attracting and retaining women. And you need to gather together more if your staff operates like a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, rather than a gymnastics team whose members do their own individual events. (This explains why fully remote teams struggle to patent new technologies, but the people who examine patent applications are more productive when they can work from anywhere they like.)第三，混合办公并非“一刀切”。不同工作需要不同程度的面对面交流；不同人也是如此。例如，工作灵活性对于吸引和留住女性员工尤其重要。如果员工的工作方式更像篮球队，需要不断传球配合，那么他们就需要更多聚在一起；如果更像体操队，每个人负责自己的项目，那么面对面时间的需求就没那么高。（这也解释了为什么完全远程的团队在申请新专利方面表现欠佳，而专利审查员在能够自由选择工作地点时工作效率反而更高。）Four: Most people care more about when they work than where. If they can choose the hours, they’re more willing to let leaders pick the place.第四，大多数人更在乎什么时候工作，而不是在哪里工作。如果他们可以自己选择工作时间，那么他们通常更愿意接受由领导来决定工作地点。Organizational policies shouldn’t be vanity projects. The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.组织政策不应该是领导者的“面子工程”。领导者的责任不是让世界来适应他们的需求，而是适应世界的需求——即使这意味着要学着在没有现场观众带来的兴奋感的情况下生活。Adam Grant是观点文章作者，也是宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院的组织心理学家。他著有《再思考》(Think Again)一书，也是TED播客节目“重新思考”(Re:Thinking)的主持人。Marissa Shandell是沃顿商学院的博士候选人，研究人们在工作中发挥最佳状态的驱动力。她也是Instagram账号@researchdoodles的博主。Courtney Elliot是沃顿商学院的博士候选人，研究远程办公、社交媒体和技术如何影响职场人际关系。翻译：杜然点击查看本文英文版。