The Rise of Remote Work

In the spring of 2020, the daily routine of millions of people fell apart almost overnight. The COVID-19 pandemic forced offices to close across the world, and companies scrambled to move their operations online before they lost a single working week. Nobody expected the change to last. Yet what started as an emergency stopgap settled in, quietly, until it had reshaped how businesses operate for good.

Cast your mind back to the years before the pandemic and the picture looks very different. Working from your kitchen table was unusual: surveys suggest that fewer than 10% of workers in developed economies did so on any regular basis. Bosses assumed staff at home would slack off, slip out of reach, and drift away from their colleagues. Those fears, as the months ahead would show, mostly came to nothing.

If anything, the opposite happened. Researchers studying the period found that plenty of people got more done once they were out of the office. No commute, no colleague leaning over the desk every ten minutes, no obligatory small talk by the kettle, and suddenly the actual work felt easier to finish. The Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom put a number on it: in his study, call centre workers allowed to work from home posted a 13% increase in productivity.

The gains were never spread evenly, though. A parent juggling a toddler, anyone wedged into a cramped flat, anyone with a connection that dropped out mid-call, all found the arrangement far harder than the headlines suggested. Industry mattered too. Knowledge workers, the people whose jobs revolve around processing information rather than handling physical goods, made the switch with relatively little friction. For those in manufacturing, retail, and healthcare it was a different story: they had little choice but to keep showing up in person.

Once restrictions lifted, few employers wanted a clean return to the old way. Many landed on a hybrid model instead, letting staff split the week between the office and home. Workers took to it quickly, and flexibility now tops the list of things they weigh up before accepting a job offer. For employers the appeal is partly financial: they can shed costly office space while still reaching a wider talent pool, especially when they are happy to hire people who live nowhere near company headquarters.

Where all of this leads is still anyone''s guess. City centres that once hummed with office workers spilling out for lunch have seen a lasting drop in foot traffic. The sandwich shops, dry cleaners, and coffee bars that lived on that daily crowd have, in many cases, shut their doors for good. Further out, the story runs the other way. Suburbs and smaller towns have gained residents as remote workers trade expensive urban centres for somewhere with more room.