As the end of the pandemic approaches, as the percentage of the population immunized increases and as we resume many of the habits that the risk of virus transmission forced us to interrupt, it’s becoming clear why human evolution is slower than it should be.

Talking to business leaders regularly it’s clear that the vast majority want to return to the old days. Ask about the rules they are dictating (the choice of the verb is not accidental) to their employees, the majority say they want their employees to go back to working “as before”, working from the office, and at most, as though this were some major concession, working remotely “a couple of days a week”, but under strict rules, and not exceeding a certain number of hours per month.

The reasons for this fear of change leads managers to propose a return to working practices as though this were “logical” or “natural”, inventing, without any evidence, problems and using axioms such as “people need to be in contact with each other to work”, “you can’t sell by videoconference”, or “innovation depends on those casual contacts by the coffee machine.”

They may sound logical and persuasive, but these are unproven assertions trotted out as a justification for fear of change. Believing that you need to physically be in front of the person you’re selling something to reveals a fixed mindset (many companies follow a distributed work model and are doing very well) or from a lack of ambition (maybe it difficult to sell via a crappy videoconference, badly illuminated and without advanced virtual resources, so how about trying to do it well? ) A one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work. Why work from home two days a week, and not three? Or why not as many days as people want, and if they abuse this, take the corresponding action?

The supposed problems of distributed work are usually lumped together as the 5 Cs:

Loss of Control
Loss of Culture
Loss of Collaboration
Loss of Contribution
Loss of Connection

And all of them, 1 through 5, are falsehoods and misconceptions cited by people who are afraid of change: managers who believe that the business culture must be based on authority as if we were back in the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution when only visual and direct supervision kept workers from slowing down.

If we continue to allow managers paralyzed by myths and fear of change to make decisions like these, if we continue to perpetuate authority as the basis of corporate culture, we will be going about things in the wrong way. But unfortunately, there are too many people who don’t mind getting it wrong as long as they don’t lose their authority and the culture that supports it, as long as they don’t have to change their beliefs, so long as they don’t have to evolve. Identify them and try to avoid their influence in your company. They are toxic, very dangerous. For everyone.