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early five years after the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses worldwide to adopt new practices and organizational structures, remote work has cemented itself as a highly desired workplace perk across industries. According to a 2024 survey of over 4,000 professionals by FlexJobs, half of respondents said they’d even accept a pay cut in exchange for that freedom.
For localization professional Alessio Demartis, remote work flexibility is a top priority when considering career options. He explained, “I’m open to hybrid models, but any return to a traditional office would require compelling incentives — significantly higher compensation, exceptional professional development opportunities, or a truly innovative work environment.”
While many professionals love remote work, they also recognize it requires adjustments to implement effectively. Without the oversight and structure of an office environment, the worker is responsible for organizing effectively, avoiding distraction, and, for some, mitigating potential loneliness and isolation.
“In an office, there’s an inherent structure — social interactions, professional rhythms, and external accountability,” Demartis said. “At home, you have complete freedom, which requires self-discipline. I developed robust digital tools and personal frameworks to create clear work-life boundaries and ensure I remain focused and motivated.”
It requires a balance, but Demartis — who is now Chief Revenue Officer at Breeze Docs — believes remote work is here to stay, and that’s good news for employees and employers alike.
“Remote work represents more than a temporary trend; it’s a fundamental reimagining of productivity and professional engagement,” he said. “It demands self-awareness, strong communication skills, and a proactive approach to maintaining professional connections.”
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Rewind almost exactly five years. It’s February 2020, and authorities have confirmed the 15th case of COVID-19 in the United States (US), with more reports under investigation. The passengers of the cruise ship Diamond Princess are stranded off the coast of Japan as additional positive cases roll in. Day by day, the global community braces for a pandemic that experts increasingly recognize as a once-in-a-century crisis — the kind that potentially destroys economies and kills millions.
As the weeks unfold and the world is paralyzed by quarantines and infections, global businesses recognize that traditional office policies are out of the question. Driven by necessity, leaders implement remote work infrastructure at blistering speeds, and millions of workers experience remote work for the first time.
Prior to the pandemic, remote work was a rare professional perk typically enjoyed by freelancers or professionals who prioritized it in contract negotiations. Prior to the pandemic, it barely budged in its growth rate: starting at 4 percent of the American workforce in 2009 and growing to 6 percent by 2019, according to the National Council on Compensation Insurance. Compare that to 2020, when the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that telework accounted for 50 percent of paid work hours between April and December, compared to 5 percent before the pandemic.
Suddenly, bosses and employees alike found themselves figuring out how to work from home. But as an industry with a higher-than-usual rate of remote work, language companies had an advantage. Demartis, for instance, was already armed with remote work experience from his time as a translator and interpreter in Spain. He was working at memoQ when the pandemic hit, and Demartis says it only accelerated the company’s inevitable track toward a fully remote structure.
“When I started working for memoQ in 2020, we had an office in a shared space where we met two to three times every week,” he said. “However, the pandemic accelerated our existing trend towards remote work, transforming our shared office model into a fully remote environment.”
While COVID-19 remains a part of our lives to this day, the pandemic’s most serious social impacts slowed along with infection rates. The world settled into a post-pandemic equilibrium that was, if not normal, something that resembled the pre-2020 reality. But now that they had remote work, professionals showed no interest in giving it up.
It’s no secret that employers aren’t thrilled about the rise of remote work. According to a Los Angeles Times survey, 60 percent of employers surveyed oppose remote work and want to see employees back in the office. But they’re finding stiff resistance from professionals, who are reluctant to give up their newfound freedom.
According to a CNBC article published in September 2023, an astonishing 90 percent of companies aimed to implement return-to-office policies by the end of 2024. According to a KPMG study of 1,300 global CEOs, 64 percent expect that everyone will be back in their cubicles by 2026, while 87 percent said they were more likely to delegate “favorable assignments, raises, or promotions” to in-office workers.
The employer demand was spearheaded by massive household names like Amazon, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, and Citigroup. Suffice it to say that employers were eager to claw back the tools lost to the pandemic, with some offering honey (incentives for in-office work) and others vinegar (penalties and terminations for remote employees).
The data indicates that companies have achieved some success in dragging workers back to the office. Published in October 2024, a US Bureau of Labor Statistics report indicates that, across all industries studied, remote work was more common in 2021 compared to 2022.
Employees are not pleased, to say the least. According to Forbes, 73 percent of surveyed Amazon employees said they were reconsidering their positions when the company announced its return-to-office mandate, while 77 percent view the policies as “a control mechanism rather than a productivity booster.”
And employees are voicing their discontent through resistance. A Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study indicates that 20 percent of remote workers were not coming into the office as often as company policy demanded.
“Firms asking for four days or fewer are faring better, with take-up rates of 80 percent and higher,” the study reports. “But while that rate may sound promising, it means that the typical team of seven or eight people will find one or two members working from home on any given day.”
While industry giants flex their muscle, small- and medium-sized companies find that more generous remote work policies give them hiring leverage. According to Forbes, 72 percent of recruiters report hiring difficulties for companies demanding full-time office work, and Flex Index report data indicates that 70 percent of companies with fewer than 500 employees are turning that into a recruitment advantage.
“In contrast, only 14 percent of enterprises with over 25,000 employees provide the same freedom,” Forbes reports.
What does the future hold for working from home? Forbes predicts that companies stung by the unintended consequences of return-to-office mandates (such as loss of top talent, increased leave requests, and sagging productivity) may ease off on broad mandates in favor of individualized arrangements or hybrid models. But only time will tell what becomes of remote work by the dawn of 2026.
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One thing is for sure: It’s hard to underestimate the popularity of working from home. According to Statista, 91 percent of employees worldwide prefer full or almost-full remote work. It’s easy to see why, when Forbes reports that full-time office employees spend an average of $1,020 monthly on in-office and commuting expenses. Commuting also costs something even more valuable: time. With the average American commute taking 27.6 minutes, traffic-trapped employees bemoan the lost time that could have been spent sleeping, minding children, exercising — or, really, doing almost anything else.
A 2023 Pew Research study found that work from home enabled better work-life balance for 71 percent of respondents. That’s especially true for parents of children younger than 18, 76 percent of whom said remote work was very or somewhat helpful for work-life balance (compared to 69 percent of non-parents). Curiously, 12 percent of respondents felt remote work actually hurt their ability to strike the right work-life balance — a small percentage, but one perhaps indicative of varying abilities to adapt.
Work from home also offers the flexibility to work at more desirable times and use break times more effectively.
“As a night owl, traditional office hours always felt constraining,” Demartis said. “Working from home allows me to align my work with my natural productivity cycles. I can tackle complex tasks when I’m most alert and use breaks productively — whether it’s a mid-day gym session or grocery shopping during off-peak hours.”
But what about productivity? That’s a complicated question and one that’s still being studied closely. To a great extent, it depends on an individual’s work ethic and practices. And some are more disciplined than others. Demartis, for instance, reports an increase in productivity while working from home.
“During a critical translation project for an international client, I experienced the true power of remote work’s flexibility,” he said. “When a power outage hit my neighborhood, I seamlessly transitioned — first working from a local café with excellent WiFi, and then from a colleague’s home the next day. These experiences reinforced my appreciation for not being tethered to a single physical workspace, proving that professional commitment isn’t about location, but adaptability and connectivity.”
According to Work From Home and Productivity: Evidence From Personnel and Analytics Data on Information Technology Professionals, a study published in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, overall productivity remains nearly unchanged — but due to inefficiencies and communication difficulties introduced by remote work, workers may actually be working longer.
“In our sample, employees were able to maintain similar or just slightly lower levels of output during [work from home,]” the study concludes. “In order to do so, they worked longer hours. For this reason, productivity, measured by output per hour worked, fell by 8-19 percent.”
By contrast, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found a positive relationship between remote work and productivity.
“Total factor productivity growth over the 2019–22 period is positively associated with the rise in the percentage of remote workers across 61 industries in the private business sector, even after accounting for pre-pandemic trends in productivity,” the study states. “This is because unit costs, especially unit non-labor costs, grew less in industries where more work was done from home.”
Researchers are still laboring to understand one possible downside of remote work: social isolation. With less time out of the house interacting with coworkers, some report a degradation in mental health.
“The primary downside is potential social isolation, which varies by location,” Demartis said. “I’ve noticed this more acutely in Canada compared to Spain, where community connections seem more naturally integrated into daily life.”
According to a Gallup study on the subject, 20 percent of workers report their mental health is either fair or poor, a health issue leading to nearly 12 days in unplanned absences on average. That adds up to USD $47.6 billion annually in lost productivity — to say nothing of the humanitarian concerns.
Pew Research backs social isolation as the chief remote work concern, with 53 percent of respondents reporting that working from home “hurts their ability to feel connected with co-workers.
“In spite of this, those who work from home all the time or occasionally are no less satisfied with their relationship with co-workers than those who never work from home.”
Studies show that female workers are most likely to be affected by the social isolation of remote work. Younger professionals, who face more challenges building lasting social relationships in a highly atomized and digitized world, are also more likely to face mental health impacts. The upshot: While the impact varies by individual, all remote workers should make a point to take special care of their mental well-being.
Regardless of the potential downsides, it’s clear the vast majority of workers consider remote work a major boost to their overall happiness and workplace satisfaction — one that makes a material difference in where they choose to work. Moving into 2025, the biggest outstanding question is whether employers will continue their quest to kill remote work in the cradle.
For many employees, a return to five days in the office is a regression to policies of centuries past — and they’re not interested in going back.
“We’re moving beyond outdated work models inherited from the industrial era, where physical presence was equated with productivity,” Demartis said. “Technology has now enabled a more flexible, results-oriented approach, and personal discipline remains the key to making this new work paradigm successful.”
Cameron Rasmusson is a senior writer and editor for MultiLingual Media.
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