I had promised an update on remote work, and now it’s time make good on that promise.  Back in September 2025, I had run a survey asking what topics were of most interest to my current readers.  The top results:

• 19% – Post-modern agile (many of my current readers are in the agile community)
• 17% – AI as teammate, not overlord
• 15% – How to navigate your career (trails) 
• 11% – Leading teams on a roller coaster economy
• 9% – Managing remote work

The sample size was low.  So these percentages are somewhat skewed.  But it answers the question I get asked often: “Why don’t you write much about remote work anymore?”  My writings, talks, and most of my 70+ podcast interviews on remote work was how I became known to most people from 2014-2020.

However, remote work is not the biggest concern most people have these days.  So I tried to shift my writing to topics I felt were helpful to my audience, Yet, remote work remains something I practice and research every week. 

Also, what about the other topics?  Oddly enough, all five topics listed above are actually related.  I’ll share more about that later.

But let’s talk about how far remote work has come.

Remote Work – 2019 vs 2025

First off, Work From Home (WFH) does not represent all of remote work, but that remains the focus of the media when discussing remote or hybrid remote work.  This is why I tended to use the term “distributed” over “remote” because of the assumptions behind the latter term.  I’ve worked with distributed teams in some form for most of my career in technology and they usually show up in four forms:

1. Satellite – some team members working from home occasionally while the bulk of the team works in an office. I would often see “specialists” as the satellite whether they were contractors or experts in their field.
2. Cluster – parts of a team work in different locations and often different timezones.  There were numerous reasons for these arrangements, but I often found the assumption was some form of reducing labor costs.  Other related costs were ignored.
3. Nebula – everyone on a team working fully remote and could be spread across cities and timezones.  Usually brought together because of their talents to do the work and collaborate.
4. Combo – Some combination of the first two types.

In my experience, the distributed teams with the greatest challenges were (2) Cluster teams and (4) Combo teams.  Today, we call them hybrid teams.  To understand this, I recommend reading my book with Johanna Rothman, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (2018).  I’ll not go into details here as to the many challenges with hybrid remote teams, but let’s just say I used the label “cluster” for multiple reasons.

But where are we today?  Unfortunately, finding data that spans these four categories of distributed work is difficult to track down.  But there are some useful sources that I’ll summarize:

Here are some interesting statistics:

• Remote work has stabilized rather than disappeared: global average work-from-home days are about 1.27 per week (down from 1.6 in 2022 but well above pre‑COVID levels)
• A “return-to-office” push is still underway: one projection has companies requiring five days in office rising to about 30%, with nearly half planning four or more office days by 2026
• The higher the education level and management level, the more likely you will work remote
• English-speaking economies typically offer 1.5–2 WFH days per week versus about 0.5 in many other countries, reflecting stronger adoption in North America, the UK, and similar markets.
• Depending where in the world you are, 1 in 3 to 1 in 10 people work remotely at least part of the time.

But what I find the most telling is this chart that Nick Bloom from Stanford has updated and shared multiple times.  I’ve annotated it with my interpretation. 

People who care about how they work will want more choice in how they work, when they work, and where they work.  Those choices can vary each week and even throughout the day.  Which makes complete sense in today’s culture.  If we want a choice of what food we eat, what streaming services we watch (or not), what we do with our free time, why wouldn’t we want choice on how to do our best work?

But choice is not the key reason for remote work for me.

Remote Work Had Nothing To Do With Being In An Office

Remote work, for me, had little to do with being in an office or not.  Yes, I prefer working at home as I can control my environment and distractions and it is more comfortable for my introverted ways that require deep focus periods.  The chatter of the office seems intolerable at times for me.  So choice remains a key factor driving remote work for me and others, but it’s not the most important reason.

For me, remote work helped me challenge all my assumptions about work so I could improve how I work.  How much focus time did I need?  How much socialization did I need?  How much direction or alignment checks did I need from management or peers?  When did I need to brainstorm with others?  What (really) is the nature of collaboration?

When we get in the “habits” of work (going to the office, suffering the commute, going into the same meetings), we become numb to the assumptions we make about how we work and if we could work better.  I’m always looking to challenge how I can do things better.

That’s what remote work did for me: challenge me to work better.

How do you challenge yourself to work better?

Hope that helps,

Mark

Footnotes:

• One of the things that re-inspired me about remote work is reviewing the latest book from Pilar Orti.  I’m looking forward to that book being released and I was grateful to preview an early copy.
• If you are wondering where I got some of my research on remote work, you can view some of my recent research and sources here.  But of course, there is more research than that.  I just didn’t want to bury my readers in statistics.  The original graph I annotated can be found at https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/next-recession-could-boost-working-home and a huge thank you to Nick Bloom for his continued research.
• Have questions about what I raised here?  Let me know.