This blog post is part of our Evolving Workplace series. To hear more thought leadership, check out series episodes on the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.
It’s tempting to think that remote work has been around long enough that we have figured it out. But there are differing opinions: It is a lifesaver. Unless it’s a disaster and everyone should get back to the office post-haste. Maybe we think it is a mess but we’ll figure it out. Why haven’t we found a magic bullet yet?
Let me ask you: If you were creating a policy for building your organization (or team’s) culture and business model, would you turn to someone who was thirty-four years old?
This sounds like an arbitrary number, but it’s really not. Remote work as we recognize it really dates only back to the early 1990s. Then there are major milestones and seismic events along the way that impact how we look at working from a distance. If we look at how quickly we accepted this new way of working, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we haven’t got all the answers.
Let’s start in 1990
In 1990 we had land lines, fax machines (in the offices, few people had them at home) and the internet was in the hands of scientists and computer geeks. If people had computers, they were huge clunky things with monochrome screens and very little memory. The first dial-up internet was invented.
What remote work there consisted mostly of salespeople in remote territories who conducted work by phone and fax and traveling to meet their clients by car or airplane. A few tech companies also allowed their best and brightest to plug away at code in their homes away from noisy offices and prying eyes.
It was… not optimal.
1993 was a sneaky important year. (Only 31 years ago, if you’re counting.)
In 1993, IBM began experimenting with letting some of their employees work from home, at least part of the time. They were the first large company to even consider such a radical idea. This was partly due to the fact that six months earlier, in 1992, they released the ThinkPad. It was the first truly portable (which is debatable if you ever had to schlep one of those bricks around) and internet-capable laptop computers.
Most of the early adopters were busy managers or executives who had to travel to various offices, or salespeople who used it to keep up with their customers, also while traveling. Few homes could support dialup internet and VPNs became a thing.
Email was starting to be a thing but used sparingly.
Two critical things that were mostly thought of as consumer applications appeared which lit the fuse for internet-based work:
- Microsoft Word 6.0 was released, making word processing, editing and writing simple for the computer illiterate
- America OnLine (AOL) became available to Microsoft/Windows users for the first time. Suddenly a critical mass of the workforce had internet access in their homes.
What’s important is that remote work didn’t really even seem possible until people began playing with the internet for entertainment and email purposes. There was a time when some people had way better computers in their homes than they had in the office. Working from home became possible (and in some cases, preferable.)
1999 (it took a while to ramp up to the next big step)
For 6 years, the ability to work remotely snuck up on us. Salespeople were given laptops first, and for the first time were responsible for their own communication with customers, rendering office steno/secretary pools largely obsolete. (Whether it was a good idea or not is another argument.) Microsoft Office products like Excel and especially PowerPoint became the standard, so everyone could talk to everyone else.
This made for a computer-savvy populace. More and more people were starting to work from home (a whopping 4% of the population in 1994, 5% by 1999.) Internet speeds were picking up. Then came the next quantum leap in workplace communication.
In 1999, WebEx became widely available. Originally requiring special studios and equipment, a laptop-friendly version became available at the turn of the century. Webmeetings, webinars, Virtual Instructor Led Training suddenly was widely available, if very expensive and used only by “experts.”
2000 Things pick up fast from here.
In 2000, Skype snuck over from Europe. Free video calls were available. Laptops began having cameras built in. The age of asking if you really had to be on camera for this meeting had started.
While there’s no hard evidence, this is about when people realized they could get at least some of their work done outside the office. Childcare, bad weather, working through the sniffles became more common. The age of Stealth Remote Work was here.
2013- The numbers jump
By 2013, the US Dept of Labor says nearly 20% of white-collar workers had worked from home occasionally. The numbers kept rising and people became more comfortable with it. Some companies created formal policies (then like Yahoo, uncreated them because it got too confusing and they didn’t know how to handle the chaos.)
Over the next seven years or so, companies allow remote work, sometimes to hire the best talent, sometimes to ensure work continues during personal crises, bad weather, or business interruptions. Only 10% of companies have formal remote work policies in 2018, although most recognize the need for it.
Not coincidentally, 2018 sees the release of The Long-Distance Leader, Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership. It is eventually published in seven languages.
2020 Covid happens and we get pushed across the Rubicon
You all know what happens next. The weekend of March 17, 2020 becomes a watershed moment. Suddenly 35% of knowledge workers are working from home full (or mostly-full) time. Functions and people who never considered themselves remote-work-capable found they did it with little training and far less loss of productivity than expected. Products like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and others had been there for a while, like the rodent-like mammals hiding from the dinosaurs, but suddenly became ubiquitous.
Remote work became practical, and many people said it was the future of work. People began moving out of the city to cheaper places, where commutes didn’t matter. Employees were hired with less focus on their location than their talent. The great remote work revolution had reached critical mass.
2023 Not so fast, hotshot
When the immediate threat of the pandemic died down, many organizations wanted to return to how things were. Some people were able to maintain remote work, others couldn’t wait to go back to the office. There was the Great Resignation, (people quitting rather than return to work) then the Great Return (we don’t care, get back here). Return to Office mandates were chaotic, inconsistent and often didn’t work as planned. Many companies went back to Stealth Remote, which kept employees happy but didn’t solve many of the systemic problems like succession planning and fair employee evaluations.
2025 You are here
And so here we are. 77% of large corporations allow flexible or hybrid work (although it’s inconsistent and largely unregulated). 25% of the general workforce works mostly remote, while 32% of the general workforce is in the office full-time. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent, successful, replicable model for people to follow.
That brings us back to our original question. If remote work as we know it is barely thirty years old (and for practical purposes more like twenty-five), are we really surprised that most of us are still figuring it out. Years of ingrained, programmed behavior has changed. The way we physically do our jobs has shifted radically within a single generation.
The point here is that there are more questions than answers about remote work. Even though it appears the boom is over, the need to have people working effectively regardless of location has not (and will not) change.
Leaders and organizations must be intentional about their goals and expectations, while finding new ways of collaborating, communicating and executing in order to survive in the evolving workplace.
We are here to help.
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