Years after COVID, the remote-work wars are still raging

Remote-work wars are still raging

Five years ago this month, companies around the world sent their people home. Employees who worked at a computer took their laptops home and began a great work-at-home experiment. If you worked in technology, management, advertising, public relations, finance, sales, or, like me at the time, consulting, then you stopped going into an office and started doing all of your work in your living room or a spare bedroom.

This set off a scramble to redesign working life for a remote work world. Employees carved out workspace in their homes and redesigned their personal routines. Companies invested in remote working software like Zoom, Teams, and Slack.

But the question was always going to be: what would happen after the pandemic passed? Some people upped sticks and moved to large houses in remote areas, convinced they would never need to report to an office again. Others got stir crazy at home and yearned for the days of going into an office.

By early 2022, most government restrictions on movement and gathering in public had been relaxed. But the struggle over remote work was just beginning.

Employees had gotten used to the flexibility and freedom of remote work: they saved time and money on commuting, and they could better incorporate childcare, household chores, and healthy eating into their daily routines. But company bosses worried that remote workers would slack off—or, at minimum, that they wouldn’t be as productive or creative working separately rather than together.

Now, five years after the pandemic started, and three years after it was safe to work in offices again, the question still has not been resolved.

Many companies have a hybrid arrangement, where employees have the flexibility to work remotely at least some of the time. But often this masks inequality within the workforce: most hybrid offices have a few people who almost never come into the office, while others are in every day. As a rule, company bosses want less remote work. And now they are starting to push for less remote work. To get it, they are using a mixture of carrots and sticks—carrots being rewards, sticks being punishment. Let’s start with the sticks—or the punishments.

Jamie Dimon is the boss of JP Morgan Chase, a global bank. He has long been a skeptic of remote work—and now his patience is running out. At the beginning of 2025, the bank announced the end of remote work: employees would be expected in the office five days a week. Hundreds of people signed a petition against the move: in an employee town hall, the bank’s boss said he didn’t care how many people signed that petition. The comments area of the webinar had to be turned off.

In late 2024, Amazon said the same thing. Starting at the beginning of 2025, hundreds of thousands of employees would have to be back at their desks five days per week. WPP, the UK-based advertiser, started enforcing a four-day-per-week mandate.

Do you know the website WebMD? WebMD’s parent company produced a video scolding staff who didn’t come into the office. The smiling CEO ended the video by saying “we aren’t asking or negotiating.” Dell, AT&T, and even the American federal government are all enforcing a five-day-per-week in the office model.

How are they enforcing the new rules? Some companies are starting to use information like badge swipes, desk reservations, and other data to monitor office attendance. And even companies that don’t prohibit remote work are using office attendance as a performance metric.

New software firms are popping up to help companies track office attendance and integrate it into HR conversations and performance management. One accounting firm in the U.K. is emailing staff and their bosses a summary of their working locations each month: the not-so-subtle message is that more days in the office is better.

Many people interpret these moves as a way of reducing or changing the workforce without announcing layoffs. The employees that don’t want to come into the office can quit. And managers have another ready-made excuse to fire employees they don’t like. “Oh, you weren’t in the office five days per week last month? That’s against policy. See you later.”

But this approach can annoy even the star performers who do go into the office most of the time. As one commentator put it, “nothing says ‘I don’t trust you’ like a mandate with badge swipes monitoring your every move.”

But not every company is resorting to mandates. Some are trying to make the office a more attractive place to go. Many are renovating and repurposing office space, with more natural light and more comfortable workstations. Some are offering free meals and stipends for things like transportation, household services, and pet care.

Is there an end in sight to the remote-work battles? Despite the headlines, most employers are settling on a compromise: a little more remote work than bosses want, and a little less than employees want. One to two days of remote work lets employees have some flexibility in their personal lives. And remote work is now a bargaining chip in job negotiations. A talented employee might have the option to work at Amazon, but might accept a pay cut to go somewhere with a more flexible policy on hybrid work.

Jeff’s take

This is unbelievable. I remember in mid-April 2020, I was on a Teams call with some of my colleagues at the firm I worked for, and we were taking bets on when we’d be back into the office full time. And one person said the end of the year—the end of 2020, and everyone laughed. That was so ridiculous, we all thought; surely, this whole remote thing was just another month or two.

I will mention that the perspective I shared in this story is very much of the English-speaking world. I would say the main message is applicable to the U.S., Canada, and U.K. But I read a study from JLL, a big office landlord, that talked about remote work in Latin America.

And it found that the number of workers doing full remote work is not much higher now than before the pandemic. But the percentage of hybrid work—a few days in the office, a few days at home—the percentage of hybrid work went from 26 percent to 72 percent. So hybrid work is catching on in Latin America, too, at least in the types of jobs where it’s possible.