Malcolm Gladwell sparks backlash after attacks on working from home

‘Malcolm Gladwell needs you at your cubicle if he’s going to write more pseudoscience self-help books marketed to dummies who were in a gifted class forty years ago’

Author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell has come under fire for his criticism of working from home despite doing so himself for years.

Appearing on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Mr Gladwell said a recession will probably push those “sitting in their pyjamas” to head back into the office.

He told host Steven Bartlett that employees have to go to the office to get a “sense of belonging” again and to feel that they are a part of something that’s bigger than themselves.

“It’s very hard to feel necessary when you’re physically disconnected,” he said, adding that “as we face the battle that all organisations are facing now in getting people back into the office, it’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary”.

“And we want you to join our team and if you’re not here it’s really hard to do that,” Mr Gladwell said.

“It’s not in your best interest to work at home. I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pyjamas in your bedroom, is that the work-life you want to live?” he asked. “Don’t you want to feel part of something?”

“I’m really getting very frustrated with the inability of people in positions of leadership to explain this effectively to their employees,” he said.

“If we don’t feel like we’re part of something important, what’s the point?” Mr Gladwell added. “If it’s just a paycheck, then it’s like what have you reduced your life to?”

Mr Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine but has rarely been seen at the office, according to a colleague.

“I worked at The New Yorker for several years. I didn’t once see him at his desk or in the office,” Michael Donohoe tweeted.

Mr Gladwell told New York magazine in 2008 that he refused to commute from his West Village home to the New Yorker office in midtown because of his “aversion” to the area and he told The Guardian in 2005 that he “hates desks”.

“I hate desks. Desks are now banished. I work better when I’m comfortable,” he said at the time.

“I refer to my writing as ‘rotating’. I always say ‘I’m going to rotate’ because I have a series of spots that I rotate,” he said, noting that he has a number of favourite restaurants and cafes to work from.

Mr Gladwell wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2010 that “the problem with writing in coffee shops is that everyone hates the kind of people who write in coffee shops ... You see the guy in the corner hunched over his laptop and you think (forgetting, for the moment, that you are also hunched over a laptop): ‘For chrissake, get an office.’ As someone who writes in coffee shops for a living, I have wrestled with this paradox for much of my adult life”.

“If I’m working there, the last thing I want is to see you hunched, pathetically, over your computer,” he added at the time.

“The coffee-shop writer needs to be, as the sociologists would say, an outlier and not a pioneer. You don’t want to be the laptop cowboy who signals to other laptop cowboys that this is the place to be. You want the club that won’t have you as a member,” he wrote.

Social media users were quick to criticise Mr Gladwell.

“God I cannot stand these damn hypocrites. Gladwell was a, well, outlier of working remotely – guess that’s only ok for bestselling authors but not the rest of us plebes,” Twitter user Julie wrote.

“I have never felt ‘part of something’ or a ‘sense of belonging’ working in a corporate office. Working from home and getting distance from that toxic environment is a blessing. Malcolm Gladwell can go f**k* himself – especially since he also works from home. A**clown,” another account holder said.

“Presumably it was a different Malcolm Gladwell (twin brother?) who wrote enthusiastically and often about working from coffee shops,” Martin Robbins added.

“This from a guy who works where he wants. Explain the lost ‘culture’ to my team members who save two hours of commuting a day. For some types of work, in-person is important. For our divorce law firm, remote worked beautifully for two and a half years,” Raiford Palmer tweeted.

“Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favourite frauds. A ‘public intellectual’ with no qualifications for being one, writing on topics he has no expertise on, declared as such because he says the things powerful people like to hear,” another account holder said.

“Malcolm Gladwell needs you at your cubicle if he’s going to write more pseudoscience self-help books marketed to dummies who were in a gifted class forty years ago,” TV writer Mike Drucker added.

“What does *author* Malcolm Gladwell know about working from an office? Does he clock in at the writing factory every day?” Molly Quell asked.