I was reading an article on NDIS changes when a sidebar article drew my attention. It was titled No, work from home culture is not ‘career suicide’. Obviously, this is of interest to me as a disabled person who is a) looking for work and b) can only work from home.
Unusually for most media, they did include disabled people in this article:
For women with disabilities, 25 per cent worked from home in 2024, a figure directly tied to record employment rates for disabled workers. The numbers in Australia align with the IWG data.
The article also points out that the CEO’s comments about needing proximity to power in order to get promoted don’t match the data on productivity when working from home.
This is the problem I’ve had for so many years about business decision making. If you go to a workshop on making business cases, you will be given all this information about having data and presenting it well. You’ll get a tiny bit of information on making sure parts within it suit the preferences of the decision maker.
But from what I’ve observed in many years of working, across many industries, is that the decision maker is not making a choice based on a well-argued business case.
They are making a decision based on personal preferences. Being in a position of power makes many people think that their opinion is fact. This is made worse by the sycophant types who believe the proximity to power rules and the decision maker then only hears from “yes men”, solidifying their idea that opinion is fact when it comes from a position of power.
I once worked in a major company (you’ve heard of them) who wanted to outsource a department purely because that’s what everyone else was doing. It wasn’t cheaper or more effective, it was just a corporate version of keeping up with the Jones’. The hearsay in the company was that the only reason they didn’t end up outsourcing was the fanboi of outsourcing was away the day the decision was being made.
Sorry, but sometimes you have to stop trusting that power equals wisdom.
