LSE and Birmingham surveyed 800 companies. The verdict is in.

Economists at the London School of Economics and Birmingham University have just published research covering 800 companies on what actually determines whether remote and hybrid work succeeds or fails. The answer is not the model. It is not the location. It is not the home broadband or the kitchen table.

It is management. Every time. We argued this in February. The study is the receipts.

The Majority Blaming Remote Work Are Wrong About the Diagnosis

More than half the companies in this study that said remote work was not working for them were, under examination, describing a management problem. Poor coordination. Unclear expectations. Leaders who had never been trained to lead people they could not see, and who responded by concluding that the problem was visibility rather than the absence of tools to replace it.

This is not a subtle finding. It is 57% of struggling organisations pointing directly at their own leadership layer and calling it a location problem. The return-to-office mandate is the most expensive possible non-solution to that diagnosis. You cannot fix an untrained manager by putting them in the same building as their team. You can only make their dysfunction more comfortable to ignore.

Training Is Not an HR Initiative. It Is a Leadership Test.

The study's most actionable finding is also its most uncomfortable one. The companies that got remote work right did not have superior technology or superior talent pipelines. They trained their managers specifically for distributed leadership: how to set expectations clearly, how to coordinate asynchronously, how to identify underperformance without confusing it with absence.

Smaller enterprises benefited most from tailored, specific training rather than generic programmes — worth noting for every founder who has dismissed management development as a large-company concern. And companies that adopted hybrid models earlier reported better outcomes than those who moved reluctantly. Resistance to the model compounded the management gap. Organisations that dragged their feet into 2020 carried that hesitance into their culture, and their numbers show it.

We Said It. LSE Proved It.

In February we made the argument from first principles — from the Stanford and Pittsburgh research, from the $556 billion in office real estate value destruction, from our own experience running distributed teams. The thesis was simple: every remote work failure, examined honestly, is a management failure wearing a location problem's clothes.

The LSE and Birmingham research did not set out to validate that position. It set out to understand what separates organisations that benefit from remote work from those that do not. It found management training. It found coordination clarity. It found that the companies loudest about remote work failing were, disproportionately, the companies that had never invested in equipping their leadership to lead without a floor plan.

What the Mandate-Issuers Should Be Doing Instead

The prescription is not complicated. Train your managers — specifically, for distributed leadership, not generically for management in the abstract. Do it at every level, including executive. Adopt the model properly rather than reluctantly. Measure delivery, not attendance. Give people clarity on what good work looks like so they do not have to infer it from proximity.

If you are considering a return-to-office mandate, run this test first: can you point to the specific management investments you have made to support distributed work? Have your managers been trained in async coordination, remote onboarding, and outcome-based performance? If the answer is no, you have not tried remote work. You have tried remote work with office-era management, found it wanting, and blamed the postcode.

57% of the companies in this study made that mistake. The research has now told them so. The question is whether they will listen — or issue a mandate instead.