Remote Work Before and After Covid

Do you remember what remote work looked like before the pandemic? Now that it is (ostensibly, your mileage may vary) over, what is the state of long-distance work in 2024? I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

As we look forward to the updated version of The Long-Distance Leader on September 17 (you can preorder it now) it’s important to remember that when the book came out in 2018, only 15 percent of companies had a formal work-from-home policy. Of course, it wasn’t called that, because the formal name in both government and business was “telecommuting.” When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase?

Let’s take a look at what’s changed before and after the Great Covid Diaspora:

          2018:

• Remote work was growing by over 20% per year, but fewer than half of what we think of as “white collar” workers had the opportunity to work from home or had taken advantage of it.
• The main forms of communication for business were Skype for Business, WebEx, and a hodgepodge of small tools vying for attention to help teams collaborate. The Google Suite was mostly used by individuals and small startups.
• Email was by far the most common communication tool.
• 20% of remote workers used their webcams. Many didn’t have one
• Sales led the way for remote work, because they had already been working in that way for years. Even if they were based in the office, outside sales people were seldom at their desks, so had to be in touch in other ways. Other departments such as HR and Finance were considered ineligible for remote work as in-person collaboration and access to information was a priority.
• Few Senior Leaders supported remote work. Working in the office was the norm, and the default. People who were remote kept the same hours as the in-office team if possible, and the HR systems favored those in the Mother Ship.
• A lot of work-from-home was based on informal arrangements, something we called “stealth remote work.”

          2024:

• Depending on who you ask, somewhere between 50 to 65% of workers do their jobs from home at least some of the time. About 35% work from home all or most of that time. This is down from the height of the Pandemic when the numbers reached over 75%.
• Tools have changed. Zoom went from a free service no one had heard of, to a verb (“let’s zoom about this”) to a syndrome, (Zoom fatigue, anyone?) and then lost market share as Microsoft Teams became more established. According to their annual report, Zoom now has 54.7% of the standalone webmeeting market globally. As organizations demanded a more unified approach to collaboration tools, Skype for Business was replaced by Microsoft Teams. Teams has over 6% of the total collaboration tools market, but is in a staggering 65% of enterprise/large businesses. Slack comes in next at about 25%.
• Email as the main communication tool has been replaced by messaging tools such as Slack and Teams, and use of text messaging has exploded as people blend their work and personal devices. As one of our class participants put it, “you can tell the age of a person by how much they use email.” Ouch.
• Sales still has the most people working remotely on a regular basis, particularly as many organizations closed smaller regional offices. Other functions have changed forever. IT, Marketing and Finance have the most remote work listings on job placement sites, indicating their move to remote first or remote only.
• Senior Leaders are more open to the possibility of remote work, but it’s not universally embraced. They know that the advantages of long-distance work (greater recruiting opportunities, ability to expand without investing in real estate, employee retention) need to be considered. At the same time, their concern about company culture, productivity, and development/networking opportunities keeps many of them insisting on being together as a team. The result is a 60% rise in what many call hybrid work, with people in the office a required number of days and working remotely the rest.
• Because remote work is the number one requested perk/benefit of new employees, companies have been faced with a choice. They either create formal hybrid and remote work policies (over half of companies now have this). Others insist on being office-first. This has had an unintended consequence. Informal working arrangements—what used to be “stealth remote work,” is again on the rise. Now they call it “backdoor remote,” but the result is the same. A hodgepodge of informal, often undocumented agreements about who is eligible for work-from-home, and how HR policies will be impacted.

Despite the trend to go back to the office, at least part time, it’s clear that the genie is out of the bottle. People want the flexibility of working from home, and organizations must deal with that reality, at least as a component of their culture and teams.