When there’s a job to be done and people on hand to do it, we often get started with the words, “Let’s go to work.” The “go to” part of that phrase fits logically because an essential step in any job is getting together (in some fashion) wherever needed to make it happen.

Ah, but Big Brother is always ready to weigh in with his own interpretation whenever there might be a favored group to protect. Two weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) asserted that a company (in this case X, the company formerly known as Twitter) may not fire an employee for refusing to go to the company’s place of business as directed by management.

Elon Musk, X’s well-known owner, has made his views on the matter quite clear. Evidently, he doesn’t hold much stock in the COVID-years practice of employees working remotely, usually from home, connecting with others via computer; he insists that those in key positions engage collaboratively at their assigned workplace. He reinforced that requirement by announcing that failure of any employee to do so is tantamount to resignation.

An employment contract is fundamentally an agreement between employer and employee, delineating agreed-upon employee compensation in return for performing the work specified. That would seem to implicitly include agreement on how and where the work is to be done. But the NLRB feels otherwise, filing a lawsuit against X for terminating an employee who refused to comply with Musk’s dictum and then lobbied other employees to follow suit.

Aside from the question of whether our government has any business preempting otherwise legal management actions by privately held corporations (it doesn’t), there are the broader implications of today’s trend toward substituting in-person engagement with online connection. As a case in point, consider the ever-growing number of teenagers — and adults — whose lives are controlled by smartphones.

We humans are social creatures. For millennia, our species has prospered through collaborative interaction with one another. For the most part, our social interactions expand progressively in three distinct phases: family, school, and work. That natural process has served humanity very well for a very long time, but of late it has been crumbling at each of those stages, with no good result.

It starts with family. The precipitous decline of the nuclear family has robbed from many children the opportunity to interact with mother, father, siblings, and extended family. Single parents, despite great sacrifice and huge effort, are rarely able to provide the stable family environment that gives children a healthy start in life.

The next stage of social development is — or should be — school. Months and in some cases years of pandemic restrictions on in-classroom learning gave us the chance to find out if a computer screen can replace personal student/teacher interaction. It was a disaster, and it is now widely recognized that the experiment hurt students — our next generation — both academically and socially.

And then stage three, the workplace: here’s where my inner old-fogey kicks in. Sixty-plus years in active employment at all levels, in military and in companies large and small, convinced me long ago that eyeball-to-eyeball interaction among customers, management, and coworkers is a critically important factor in organizational effectiveness and any organization’s success.

But on this one, there are clear pros and cons. The benefits of remote working are significant: the remote workforce avoids unproductive hours in commuting to and from work; emissions from fossil fuel-fired automobile (or from the fossil fuel generation of power to EVs) are reduced; far less dedicated building space is needed; and employees (particularly young ones) relish the freedom and flexibility it affords.

One boss who seems happily in favor of remote working (and here I use the term “working” advisedly) is our own federal government. Many federal office buildings, generously provided by taxpayers, are now more than half-empty.

It’s unfair to visualize all remote workers as logging in to work from home, still in pajamas, on mute, keeping one eye on the kids, the dog, and that day’s soap operas. We humans are adaptable, and as technology advances, workplace processes naturally evolve to take full advantage of those advances.

But it is not unfair to note that government bureaucracy is famously inefficient and that the number of government workers keeps increasing, in good times and bad. So, is that not an arena for our government’s stockholders (you and I) to be demanding more hands-on management, not less?

Obvious takeaways: (1) Business leaders, find the sweet spot for your company that balances employee needs, cost, efficiency, and the central importance of close personal interaction; (2) Government, get your own house in order and stay out of private business decisions; and (3) All of us, let the little electronic screen and keypad supplement — but never replace — the inherent human need for close person-to-person engagement.

It’s a tough world out there — we’d better stick together.