Do you ever long for those simpler days of the pre-pandemic workplace, where your entire team performed their jobs onsite every day? Where all-hands meetings could be called at a moment’s notice, with all your employees centralized in one spot?

Where you were forced to add more office cubes to ensure that everyone had a workstation? For most businesses and for many reasons, those days are unlikely to return. However, one of the biggest drivers of the modern office dynamic is the explosion of the remote work employment model.

While the trend toward remote work had been building for several decades before COVID-19, it was the shutdowns and safer-at-home mandates that thrust telework into the mainstay that it is today. During the crisis, remote work was the lifeline that kept people employed and business running, if not as usual, at least in a way that kept things going until things improved.

As challenging as it was, the flexibility that the remote work model afforded unlocked new opportunities for businesses. For instance, you could now hire a fully remote employee with the right skill set that you were unable to recruit locally, making your team stronger and more competitive. On the other hand, in-person time remained vital for fostering communication, building culture and strengthening collaboration.

So here we stand, with many companies now either encouraging or requiring their once-remote workforce to return to the office. Not surprisingly, there is notable pushback from many employees who adamantly prefer working remotely. And a hybrid model that tries to appease everyone, but that may also have its drawbacks.

Understanding the drivers that got us to this point and where we are headed is important as we navigate the future of remote work.

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The rise of fully remote workers

While the numbers involve some variability due to differences in data collection methods, the rise of fully remote work over the last 45 years has been remarkable. According to a mixture of reporting from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and others, the prevalence of fully remote work exploded, as you surely know, with the onset of the global COVID pandemic.

In the 1980s, a little more than 2 million or 2.3% of U.S. workers worked remotely. That number doubled by the year 2000, mostly driven by the demands of tech-savvy millennials whose skills were highly sought after but who, in large part, rejected the 9-5 onsite employment paradigm.

In 2019, there were nearly 6 million remote U.S. workers. Then came the pandemic. By 2021, at the peak of government mandates, 27.6 million or 17.9% of the U.S. workforce worked remotely — and the office would never quite look the same. Today, that number has dropped by about 20%, with around 23 million or 14% of the jobs remaining mostly remote.

What really started as a special perk for high-demand employees has become a mainstay for many businesses and workers. We should probably thank the millennials for priming the industry to the remote employment model in the two decades leading up to the pandemic. Without that steady buildup of remote-ready infrastructure, flexible work policies and online collaboration tools, WFH mandates would have almost certainly been far more challenging and far less successful.

Where remote work stands today

While the necessity of the pandemic employment model all but faded, many workers today still want flexibility in how and where they perform their jobs. To appease employees, many businesses now offer hybrid work options in which their team is required in the office maybe two days a week and are able to work the rest of the time remotely.

According to Gallup, in 2025, between 20-25% of the U.S. workforce held either hybrid or fully remote roles, six out of ten workers with remote-capable jobs preferred the hybrid model, one-third wanted to work fully remote and less than 10% favored being onsite full-time.

Recently, some notable large corporations, like Amazon, ended their hybrid employment model and began requiring employees to work exclusively onsite. Not surprisingly, the company faced blowback and attrition from many workers who preferred the flexibility they had enjoyed for several years. However, Amazon held fast, citing improved collaboration, mentorship opportunities and company culture as the main drivers for its return-to-office mandate.

But not all companies are following suit. Businesses like Shopify and Dropbox continue to offer flexible job models, providing them an advantage in their recruiting and retention efforts.

So, where does remote work stand today? It is neither dead nor universal, but rather an option that businesses can leverage to attract and retain talent, reduce overhead costs and often increase productivity.

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The future of remote work

Labor experts and business leaders agree that the remote work model will continue to evolve. While some employers, as mentioned, will continue to insist on a fully on-site staff, the advancements in AI and automation offer businesses and their teams a massive amount of flexibility in how and where future work is performed.

With digital jobs continuing to expand, the World Economic Forum reports that in five years, 20–25% of workers in economically developed countries will likely work remotely multiple days per week.

Looking ten years ahead, barring an unforeseen crisis that could upend expected business norms, we will likely see an increased standardization of the hybrid employment model. And by the middle of this century, the boundary between where a worker lives and where they work will likely be blurred even further, with many remote jobs being performed hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from their respective brick-and-mortar offices.

Nobody has a perfect crystal ball, but one thing is clear. The remote work model is here to stay. And business leaders who resist offering flexible employment options will likely have a much harder time staying competitive in the modern marketplace.