Is Work from Home in Nigeria a Scam?

It was a rainy Tuesday morning in Lekki, and Aderinsola needed her usual morning fix.

Every workday began with a cup of coffee and a few cookies, the ritual that helped her settle into work.

As she reached for the coffee jar, she realized she had run out of groceries.

After putting it off for several days, she decided it was finally time for a quick trip to the supermarket.

As she walked through one of the aisles of a popular supermarket in Lekki, Aderinsola spotted someone she immediately recognized. It was her boss, Mide.

Surprised to see each other on a Tuesday morning, they exchanged pleasantries before explaining why they were there. Derin mentioned that it was her work-from-home day and that she had only stepped out to buy groceries. Mide smiled and admitted that he was also working from home. The irony was impossible to miss.

This increasingly familiar scenario captures one of the biggest dilemmas of Nigeria’s hybrid work era. Employees who are supposed to be working from home are often seen at supermarkets, banks, salons, gyms, children’s schools, restaurants and countless other places during office hours. Their managers, rather awkwardly, are sometimes doing exactly the same thing.

That chance encounter perfectly captures the trust dilemma that has surrounded remote work since the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped workplaces around the world.

When offices shut down in 2020, businesses had little choice but to embrace remote work almost overnight. What began as an emergency response gradually evolved into one of the biggest workplace transformations in modern history.

Today, hybrid arrangements allowing employees to work remotely two or three days each week have become standard practice across Nigerian banks, consulting firms, technology companies, media organisations and multinational corporations.

Employers’ concerns are understandable, but they are not entirely fair. For many Nigerian professionals, working from home addresses one of the country’s biggest productivity killers: commuting. In Lagos alone, employees routinely spend between three and five hours every day navigating traffic.

Those are hours that create little value for employers while steadily draining employees’ energy, patience and wellbeing. Eliminating the daily commute allows workers to start earlier, concentrate better and devote more uninterrupted time to meaningful work.

Research increasingly supports this argument. A 2025 study involving more than 1,200 employees across Nigeria’s Ministries of Finance, Education and Foreign Affairs found that hybrid work arrangements generally improved both employee productivity and job satisfaction. Participants reported stronger concentration and better time management whenever performance expectations were clearly defined and digital collaboration tools were readily available.

Another Nigerian study reached a similar conclusion, finding that remote work significantly improved productivity only when organisations established effective management systems, clear performance expectations and regular communication.

Where supervision was weak and objectives remained vague, productivity declined noticeably. The evidence therefore suggests that working from home is rarely the problem. Poor management is.

The research also highlights several challenges that are uniquely Nigerian. Electricity remains perhaps the biggest obstacle, as frequent power outages interrupt meetings, delay deadlines and force employees to rely on generators, inverters or other costly backup power solutions.

Reliable internet connectivity remains another persistent headache because unstable broadband services and rising data costs regularly disrupt meetings and frustrate collaboration across distributed teams.

Communication also demands far greater intentionality since remote teams can easily misunderstand priorities, duplicate assignments or gradually lose their sense of connection without deliberate engagement. Cybersecurity risks continue to increase as employees access sensitive company information through home networks and personal devices that may not provide enterprise-level protection.

Perhaps the greatest challenge, however, is accountability. Managers who built their careers supervising people through physical presence often struggle to evaluate performance without seeing employees at their desks, while some employees inevitably mistake flexibility for complete freedom.

That combination creates exactly the kind of mistrust that fuels the perception that working from home is little more than an extended day off.

The solution is not to abolish work from home but to redesign how work itself is managed. Organisations need to shift from measuring attendance to measuring outcomes by ensuring every employee understands exactly what must be delivered by the end of each day or week, regardless of where the work is done.

Regular check-ins through short morning stand-up meetings, scheduled progress reviews and end-of-day updates help teams remain aligned without descending into micromanagement.

Businesses must also invest in the right technology because collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace and project management software make distributed teams easier to coordinate while improving transparency. Clear work-from-home policies are equally important, as employees should understand expectations around availability, meeting attendance, response times, and productivity standards.

Leading remote teams also requires a different management style, with supervisors learning to coach, communicate and evaluate employees based on outputs rather than physical visibility.

Five years into the hybrid work experiment, one lesson has become increasingly clear. The debate was never really about where people work; it has always been about whether organisations have built systems that make people accountable regardless of location.

A highly motivated employee will remain productive whether sitting in Victoria Island, working from home in Lekki or answering emails from a neighbourhood café. An unmotivated employee, on the other hand, will always find creative ways to avoid work even while sitting inside the office.

So, is work from home in Nigeria a scam? Not really. Poorly managed work from home certainly can be. While many employees genuinely use the flexibility to produce excellent work and achieve a healthier work-life balance, others inevitably use remote days to catch up on errands or slow the pace of their workday. That perception is precisely what fuels employer scepticism.

Rather than abandoning hybrid work, organisations should apply the same discipline to remote employees that they expect from those in the office. Staff working from home should receive clearly defined responsibilities tied to measurable outputs, deadlines and performance indicators.

Success should never be measured by whether someone remained behind a desk for eight hours but by whether the agreed outcomes were delivered.

Once accountability replaces attendance as the true measure of performance, the question is no longer whether employees are working from home. The only question that matters is whether the work gets done.