Sticks and carrots

When I started freelancing for WORLD Magazine back in 1998, the rest of the journalism and business universe did not consider you a real reporter if you worked from home. Thus, when my elementary-age boys were home during summer vacation, I had to enact sound-dampening protocols during phone interviews. My hope? That interviewees wouldn’t hear my little savages Tarzan-yelling and swinging from the curtains in other parts of the house.

This did not always go well.

My “office” was really a tiny bedroom in a tiny bungalow in a Navy housing neighborhood. The main bathroom was directly across a narrow hall. Most of the day, I kept the bedroom door open while I worked, my Mom Ears running low-level threat scans like the radome on an airborne early-­warning aircraft.

One day, I had an appointment to interview a California state senator. When the time came, I placed the call, planning to close the bedroom door once the senator was on the line. Just one problem: I had failed to notice my 8-year-old situating his rump on the white ceramic throne across the hall. As you likely know, 8-year-old boys care nothing about closing the bathroom door. And just after I introduced myself to the senator’s secretary, the little saboteur yelled at the top of his lungs:

“Can somebody bring me some toilet paper?”

No reaction from the secretary—but I wanted to melt into the carpet! Still, I pressed on with the interview. I’ve always wondered if the secretary noticed my Bond-like cool under scatological duress.

The perils of remote work, to both employer and employee, are in the news again.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, companies are pushing even harder to get workers back to the office, using a carrots-and-sticks combo managers hope will succeed where other RTO (return to office) mandates have yielded mixed results.

For example, some companies now factor office attendance into promotions. Let’s say “Sally” frequently comes into the office … and then she gets a new title. “Now Sally is the new standard. Be like Sally,” human resources consultant Jaye Johnson told the WSJ. The “carrot” idea here is to send a message to other employees without actually sending one.

Some companies were already using badge-swipe systems to track attendance. But badging often yields clever workarounds, such as: Badge in, attend a meeting, grab a coffee, go home. Now comes a more disturbing RTO strategy: cellphone tracking.

Employers have found they can use cell towers to track a worker’s whereabouts. Is he sitting at a Starbucks, logged into the company server? That means he’s probably working. But if cell towers show him bouncing from Walmart to Home Depot to Taco Bell … well, he’s probably not. It’s a clear sign remote work isn’t working when surveillance enters the picture.

WORLD reporters have worked remotely since the ­magazine’s founding in 1986. This was—and is—the only way to run our nonprofit and still keep the lights on. Today, a distributed workforce is normal in journalism. But truth be told, all of us would be delighted to be able to see each other more often.

Among the broader population, millennials (surprise!) are those most likely to insist on more time out of the office, according to a May 2025 Gallup survey. Interestingly, Gen Z (born in 1997 or after) is the group most likely to wish employees were required to work in the office more often.

Gen Z likely intuits what Scripture says: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17). Increasingly, employers, too, are noticing that digital blades like Zoom and messaging just aren’t sharp enough—a deficit, it turns out, that’s based in biology.

Neuroscience shows that when we are physically present—as Jesus was with His disciples—our brains read posture and movement, while also syncing speech and attention rhythms. This creates “neural coupling”—literal shared patterns of brain activity. And those casual lunches with colleagues matter, too. Relaxed social settings activate the brain’s creative networks. This is why “out of nowhere” ideas make their way onto the backs of napkins and sometimes even to the New York Stock Exchange.

Today’s employers want presence and for good reasons. But rather than using tricks to get it, maybe they should look to Scripture and to the way God made us instead.