In 1979, IBM let five of its employees work from home as a test. Four years later the experiment covered 2,000 people. Nobody called it a revolution at the time, but the idea that a job could be done away from the office had taken hold at a very large employer.
The vocabulary arrived earlier. Jack Nilles coined the words telecommuting and telework in 1973, when technology had just begun to link satellite offices to downtown mainframes through dumb terminals and ordinary telephone lines. By the early 1980s, branch offices and home workers could reach those mainframes with personal computers and terminal emulators.
Working at home itself is far older. The 1911 census of England and Wales asked each resident whether they worked “at home.” Centuries before that, the Hudson’s Bay Company had to manage people scattered across great distances, and it leaned on careful hiring, information requirements, direct local oversight and a shared sense of belonging built through communication.
Early adopters
By 1984 a United Technologies programmer lived in Washington state and telecommuted to his Connecticut office. The company estimated that executives with computers at home put in about two extra hours of work there. In January 1986, Erik Sandberg Diment wrote in his weekly New York Times column that he was among the few people actively telecommuting, and that he had gone into his office only twice in the previous year.
A 1995 motto summed up the shift: work is something you do, not something you travel to.
The 1990s and 2000s supplied the tools. Collaborative software, virtual private networks, videoconferencing, voice over IP, Wi-Fi laptops and tablets all made distance less of a barrier. The number of Americans working from home grew by 4 million between 2003 and 2006. In 2010 the Telework Enhancement Act required each US executive agency to set a policy allowing remote work to the maximum extent possible, as long as employee performance did not suffer.
The pandemic
COVID-19 forced the question. Workplace hazard controls in 2020 pushed white-collar workers around the world into a rapid move to remote work, and millions did it for the first time. One 2020 study estimated that 93% of the world’s workers lived in countries with some kind of workplace closure.
The change did not simply reverse when restrictions lifted. The US Census Bureau estimated that 13.8 percent of American workers, more than 22 million people, usually worked from home in 2023. That was down from 17.9 percent in 2021 and 15.2 percent in 2022, but still more than double the 5.7 percent recorded in 2019. Economist Nicholas Bloom said in 2023 that about a third of all working days were remote, against 5% before the pandemic.
Many businesses tried to pull staff back to the office once the emergency ended, and 25% of remote-working Americans resisted employer return mandates.
Who gains, who loses
Supporters of a spread-out workforce say it cuts the cost of running an office, gives employees more autonomy and flexibility, improves motivation and job satisfaction, removes the pollution from commuting, widens the pool of applicants, and lets people live where they choose. A 2024 PNAS study found that remote work pushed economic activity away from city centers, especially in cities with high levels of remote work.
Critics reply that telecommunications has never fully matched face-to-face contact, that people at home are more easily distracted, and that less social interaction can breed isolation. Organizations reported worries about lost culture and productivity. Workers pointed to fewer social interactions, patchy internet connections and heavier workloads.
The pandemic evidence is mixed. Most workers said they were as productive at home as they had been in the office before the pandemic, though time spent sitting at a workstation rose by up to two hours a day. The arrangement worked better for higher-paid and senior staff, while people at the bottom of the earnings scale saw reduced pay. Bloom expects technology to keep pushing the trend along, with drawbacks lingering for some kinds of jobs.
