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Presence is a Control Mechanism. Flexibility is a Productivity One.

  • Writer: Troy Roderick
    Troy Roderick
  • Jun 19
  • 7 min read

Australia's Productivity Commission settled something in May 2025 that should have ended a decade of argument: flexible and hybrid work is not detrimental to productivity. So what's the question that should have followed? If flexible work doesn't harm productivity, why do so many leaders and organisations still treat it like it does?The honest answer isn't about output. It's about power and control - who decides how work happens, when, and where. That's the conversation that’s not being had. And it's the one with the bigger productivity payoff.


Presence Was Never Really About Productivity

Joan Williams has spent thirty years documenting what she calls the ideal worker norm: the assumption that the serious employee is always available, always present, and has arranged everything else in their life around their job. It signals commitment and requires visibility. And it has operated as the price of admission to serious work - because it's easy to observe and hard to challenge - regardless of whether it produces better output.


Phyllis Moen and Erin Kelly ran the sharpest test of this at a Fortune 500 technology firm. They gave teams genuine control over when and where they worked in a “Results-Only Work Environment” (ROWE) and measured what happened. Output didn't change. Voluntary turnover fell by roughly 40% over three years. Burnout, stress and work-family conflict all fell significantly.Then the company was acquired. New executives found the arrangement inconsistent with their desired culture and terminated it - because they weren't comfortable with the control it gave employees - not because it had failed. Moen and Kelly's read: the resistance to flexible work is about reluctance to cede control. Not productivity, but power.


The KPMG Global CEO data makes the same point from a different angle. In 2024, 82% of Australian CEOs predicted a full return to office within three years. By 2025, this had been revised to 22%. They didn't change their minds because new productivity evidence arrived. They changed because the labour market made the control too expensive in terms of access to the talent they needed.


When Control Shifts

Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory identifies autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs, whose satisfaction predicts the quality of human motivation and performance. When people have genuine control over their work, they shift from controlled motivation (doing things to avoid negative consequences) to autonomous motivation (doing things because they matter). The performance implications are real: higher-quality work, more persistence on complex tasks, more creativity, lower burnout.In plain terms, presence requirements and struct structures extract compliance. They don't extract the best work people can do.


The reciprocity side of this is equally well-evidenced. When an organisation grants genuine flexibility, employees experience it as a signal of trust, and they reciprocate. The research on organisational citizenship behaviour and discretionary effort consistently finds that perceived organisational support is among its strongest predictors. Flexible cultures produce more of it. Rigid ones suppress it. And Podsakoff's meta-analysis found that unit-level citizenship behaviour predicts organisational productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction.


The causal evidence is sharp in places. When US Patent and Trademark Office examiners moved from working at home to working from anywhere - a deeper grant of autonomy, choosing their location as well as their schedule - output rose 4.4% with no increase in rework. The autonomy alone produced the gain. At Telstra, when All Roles Flex shifted the default from 'flexibility as an optional add-on in some cases' to 'all roles are flexible unless there's a specific reason they can't be,' control essentially moved from the organisation to the individual. The policy endured and when COVID forced every other Australian employer into an overnight flexibility experiment, Telstra already had the infrastructure and the management norms to sustain it.


It's Not Just About Where

The flexibility debate has been captured by the location question - office or home, hybrid or fully remote - partly because the pandemic made it visible and partly because location is easy to mandate. But schedule autonomy matters at least as much. A meta-analysis across 39 studies found flexitime produced positive effects on productivity, job satisfaction and absenteeism. The four-day-week trials found something similar, for example when people get to redesign how they structure a working week, they cut low-value meetings, protect their best work, and produce the same or more in fewer hours. Not by working faster, but by working better - because they decided when to do what.


The four-day-week evidence is now substantial. The global 2025 study by Juliet Schor and Wen Fan tracked nearly 3,000 employees across 141 organisations in six countries. Burnout fell 71%. Job satisfaction rose. More than 90% of companies kept the model. Australia's own pilot found the same pattern - with Momentum Mental Health reporting client numbers up 8% during its four-day-week trial. From a productivity perspective, fewer hours in the week forced the elimination of time that wasn't producing anything.


The inclusion argument belongs here too. Flexible work doesn't just help some groups participate. It removes a barrier to output that was suppressing contribution from a significant share of the workforce all along. A US natural experiment found that as working at home expanded across occupations, disability employment increased most sharply in the roles where home-working grew most. Longitudinal Australian data shows flexible work expanded participation for women with caring responsibilities.


The WGEA Scorecard shows 30% of women work part-time against 11% of men. Most organisations read that as a workforce participation figure. It's also a capacity figure. A full-time role that doesn't fit someone's life rarely produces full-time output - it produces five days of presence and something closer to three or four days of real contribution, with the gap absorbed by disengagement, fatigue, or an eventual decision to leave. The organisations getting this right aren't claiming part-time work produces more. They're recognising that a well-designed part-time role, genuinely matched to what a person can give, often delivers more usable output than a badly-fitted full-time one - and that the difference is recovered at the organisational level through job-sharing, reduced scope, or accepting a lower total cost base for that role, not by expecting one person to compress five days of value into three.


The productivity case for flexible work isn't really about where people sit or what hours they keep. It's about what happens to output when people have genuine control over the conditions of their work — and what's been suppressed when they don't. The evidence is consistent across thirty years of research and every form of flexibility tested: give people real autonomy over how they work, hold them to outcomes, and the productive capacity that rigid design was containing becomes available. That's not a people-management insight. It's a power insight. The organisations that have understood this aren't running flexibility as a retention perk or a diversity initiative. They're running it as the operating condition under which their people do their best work — and capturing the productivity that everyone else is still leaving on the table.


What the Flexibility Debate Has Been Avoiding

The ideal worker norm - always available, always present, life arranged around work - has always been easier for some people to meet than others. Not because of their capability or commitment. Because of their circumstances: no caring responsibilities, short commute, reliable health, no experience of the quiet cognitive cost of being systematically different from everyone else in the room. Rigid work design doesn't select for dedicated people. It selects for people whose lives happen to fit.


That selection has a productivity cost that doesn't show up anywhere obvious. It's in the attrition rate of people who could have contributed more but couldn't make the conditions work. It's in the engagement scores of people who are there but operating below capacity. It's in every team that is slightly less capable than it should be because the talent that would have made it more capable opted out, or burned out, or was never able to show up in full.

The organisations furthest ahead on this have stopped treating work design as a management prerogative and started treating it as a performance question.

  • When does this team do its best work?

  • What do these roles actually require in terms of location and hours - and what are we just assuming they require?


The answers vary by role, by team, by individual. Getting to them requires ceding some control over how work happens - and that's the part most flexibility conversations have never quite reached.The ones that do reach it find what the ROWE research found, and what the four-day-week trials found, and what the Productivity Commission confirmed: output holds, effort rises, and the people you most wanted to keep stay longer.


The organisations still arguing about whether flexibility is appropriate are arguing about something the evidence settled years ago. The more interesting argument is about who gets to decide how work happens and what that costs when the wrong decision is made.  It’s about power.


The Bottom Line

Next time someone in your organisation argues for tighter attendance requirements on productivity grounds, ask them to bring the data. Not the assumption or the story about culture and collaboration - the data. The Productivity Commission has looked at the Australian evidence and found no case. The ROWE experiment found no case. Thirty-nine studies on flexitime found no case. What typically does exist, when you look carefully, is a management model that confuses presence with performance, and a leadership team that has never been asked to distinguish between the two. That distinction is worth making, for productivity and for people.

 

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