Do you treat your employees like adults or like school children?

Spotify introduced its distributed work policy in February 2021 as pandemic restrictions were being lifted, and to its credit, is one of the dwindling number of companies that, as its HR director Katarina Berg said in an interview, maintains the policy on the basis that “work isn’t somewhere you go, it’s something you do,” adding that the company trusts its employees to be productive and do their jobs, because “they’re not children”.

Quite rightly, Berg believes “you can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children.” Spotify is confident that the decision to allow its employees to work from wherever they want has in no way affected productivity or efficiency, and is a policy very much favored by a workforce aware that it reduces the company’s environmental impact.

Flexible working practices will define labor relations in 2025. Distributed work must cease to be a privilege for a few, and instead become a choice for anybody whose job allows it. It makes no sense to make people feel as though they were returning to school, which is what Amazon is doing.

Airbnb, for example, allows its workers to work and live wherever they want, with a simple policy defined in just 105 words. Similarly, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston rightly observes that “employees value…