For at least two years, CEOs have been trying to bring employees back to the office, citing remote work's supposed negative effects on productivity, morale, and creative collaboration. Managers, we're told, are having a hard time monitoring and motivating dispersed teams. But what if bringing employees back to the office won't put the genie back in the bottle?

Kevin Rockmann, professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University, argues that the furor over remote work masks deeper cultural issues at play in many organizations. This cultural malaise has employees pining for an imagined past where they felt grounded and connected with their colleagues. In short, remote workers aren't unmanageable—they're suffering from pangs of nostalgia.

Rockmann's recently published research paper in the Journal of Management (co-authored by Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson University) documents the results of surveys conducted during the height of COVID (September 2020).

The thrice-daily surveys were delivered over a two-week period to 110 full-time professionals. Respondents were asked to report on their feelings of nostalgia, as well as emotional coping strategies, task performance, and counterproductive work behaviors (e.g. withholding support from colleagues and stealing time from their employer).

The overwhelming majority of participants (98 out of 110) admitted to experiencing nostalgia for life before COVID. And these feelings could have either positive or negative outcomes, depending on how the respondents dealt with them. Rockmann points to two pathways that showed up across the surveys as a whole, which he labels "approach" and "avoid."

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