One thing’s fallacious within the fashionable office, partly on account of the coercion to make staff address an disagreeable commute, further prices in garments and fuel, workplace interruptions, and inflexible schedules incompatible with child-rearing and two-career households — all as a result of administration doesn’t really feel snug with distant work.
How distant work is altering our tradition
The distant work pattern that gathered steam through the COVID-19 pandemic gave many folks a style of a way of life with out commutes and workplace buildings.
Studying the headlines, an informal reader feels there was a rush to distant work in 2020 and 2021, adopted by a reversal lately. However that’s not what occurred, precisely. In actuality, on the entire, distant work rose steeply within the first two years of the pandemic and roughly stayed up. In 2019, some 9 million folks labored remotely. In 2022, that quantity jumped to 50 million. And as of 2025, it was nonetheless round 36 million.
Regardless of pushback in opposition to distant work, it’s nonetheless a large enough issue to vary the tradition in small and large methods.
Distant work is lowering demand for workplace area, growing suburban progress, shifting financial exercise from city cores to suburbs, driving migration to mid-sized and extra reasonably priced cities, increasing residential area wants, and reshaping office tradition with better flexibility (however much less social interplay).
The pattern hasn’t been sort to some companies, together with downtown eating places, espresso retailers, dry cleaners, public transit programs, workplace provide retailers, city gyms, company catering providers, and business actual property corporations targeted on workplace leasing.
Different enterprise varieties, nonetheless, are booming: dwelling workplace furnishings firms, video conferencing and collaboration software program suppliers, suburban actual property businesses, dwelling enchancment retailers, native supply providers, coworking area operators, and broadband web suppliers.
One of the largest cultural modifications is the rise in digital nomad dwelling — working whereas touring or briefly dwelling overseas. Earlier than 2019, fewer than 10 million folks lived as digital nomads globally. By the tip of 2025, the quantity is anticipated to land someplace between 50 million and 80 million folks.
And if the countless chatter on Reddit and different social websites is any indication, there’s a big variety of folks attempting to determine tips on how to grow to be digital nomads. On Reddit, persons are always asking about tips on how to get a “digital nomad job.”
The reality is that there’s no such factor. A job is both distant, or it’s not. If it’s totally distant, then the worker is free to go wherever they need. Many firms have restricted positions which might be totally distant. And a few firms are completely distant, with each worker within the firm working remotely full-time.
Firms pleasant to distant work embody: Affirm, Allstate, Amgen, Amplify, Atlassian, BELAY, CrowdStrike, Dropbox, HubSpot, Humana, Kraken, Pearson, Pinterest, Reddit, Ryder, Spotify, StackAdapt, Stride Inc., Twilio, and Vista.
By late 2025, distant work is extra in style than ever, workplace work much less in style, and good firms are saving cash and attracting high staff by providing the pliability and freedom of distant work as a perk. And now we all know that employees will settle for considerably much less pay, only for the power to work wherever however within the workplace.
