Remote work, from a lockdown asset to a rarity nobody grants anymore

There was a moment, not so long ago, when working from home was the most normal thing in the world. It was 2020, we were all shut indoors, and companies that the day before had sworn certain jobs “can only be done in the office” discovered within a week that they could be done perfectly well from the kitchen table. Remote had become an asset, something to advertise in job postings, a promise of modernity. Six years on, here we are, watching it treated as a favor, a rare concession that employees and freelancers keep asking for, while companies, save for a few exceptions, have backpedaled almost completely.

I want to trace this arc with some numbers and some personal history, because on this subject, I have collected plenty of both.

Eighteen years ago, in Switzerland, it was already like this

The thing that makes me smile most about this whole debate is that hybrid work was not invented by the pandemic. Eighteen years ago, I worked in Switzerland, and I already did three days a week in the office and two from home, with nobody declaring a revolution. It was simply a sensible way to organize work, and it worked. Nobody checked whether I was really sitting at my desk at home, because that was never the point: the work got done, and done well.

That memory comes back to me every time I hear someone call remote a risky new experiment. It is not. For certain jobs, it is a practice decades old, one that technology has only made easier.

From Milan to the United States, and then the reversal

Then lockdown arrived, and the Milan office where I worked continued to work fully remotely afterward. It made sense: I was part of a distributed team that reported to the United States, with colleagues scattered across time zones and meetings held via video, regardless of where I happened to be. Being in a Milan office to talk with someone in San Jose changed absolutely nothing.

And despite all that, at some point, the request came to return at least three days a week. Three days in an office to take the same calls I was taking from home, with the same people who stayed on the other side of the ocean either way. That is when I started to suspect that physical presence had little to do with the actual work and a great deal to do with something else.

The Italian numbers tell a half-return

In Italy, the picture is more nuanced than it looks. According to the Smart Working Observatory at the Politecnico di Milano, in 2025, the number of remote workers is roughly 3.57 million, a very slight increase over the previous year. But the average hides two opposite speeds. In large firms, the practice holds up beautifully, with 1.945 million flexible workers, or 53% of staff. In the public sector,r it even grows by 11%. In small and medium enterprises, on the other hand, it slips backward, from 570,000 remote workers the year before to 520,000 today.

The untapped potential is enormous: the Observatory estimates that 21% of office employees could do at least half their work remotely, around 6.5 million possible remote workers against the 3.57 million who actually are. The gap between what could be done and what gets granted lives right there.

The world backpedals, but employees do not

Outside Italy, the clampdown is sharper. By the end of 2025, 27% of companies had returned to a fully in-person model, and 37% required some form of mandatory return, up from 17% in 2024. Among the Fortune 100, the shift is even more dramatic: today, 54% of desk workers are fully in-office, up from just 5% two years ago, with the average number of on-site days climbing to 3.8 from 2.6 in 2023.

The figure I find most revealing is another one: although required office time rose by 12% between 2024 and 2025, actual attendance grew only 1-3%. People, quite simply, are not showing up. And when they can, they leave entirely: eight companies in ten admit they lost talent because of return-to-office policies. In Italy, three out of four remote workers say they are ready to look for another job if remote work were revoked outright, and a University of Pittsburgh study found that the likelihood of resignation rises by 77% among the most qualified profiles when a full-presence mandate kicks in.

Productivity cannot be the excuse

Here, I want to be blunt, because this is the hinge of the whole argument. If the case for calling us back to the office were productivity, the data refutes it embarrassingly well. The largest study on hybrid work, conducted by Nicholas Bloom at Stanford, showed that working from home two days a week has no effect on productivity or career progression and reduces the resignation rate by 33%. Bloom himself, in an earlier study, measured a 13% increase in performance among people working fully remotely, attributed to fewer sick days and a quieter environment.

At the macro level, economists note a surge in US productivity starting precisely in 2020, exactly when working from home exploded. And workers confirm it: in an international IWG survey, 74% feel more productive, 76% more motivated, and 85% more satisfied with the flexible work. Anyone claiming we return to the office “to work better” is ignoring nearly all the available evidence.

So why are they really calling us back?

If it is not productivity, what is left? The reasons companies state are collaboration (68%) and company culture, yet beneath the surface, something else surfaces. Roughly a third of managers admit that monitoring employees was a goal of their return. A quarter of executives and almost a fifth of HR professionals confess they hoped the presence mandate would push some people to resign on their own, a kind of quiet layoff that avoids costs and press releases. I have written elsewhere about how frequent these reorganization cycles are and how little they have to do with people, in Layoffs and Redundancies.

Then there is control, the real elephant in the room. A University of Pittsburgh study showed that firms tend to impose returns after stock declines, without those returns improving performance: a move that speaks more of perception and power than of results. Add the real-estate investments that need justifying, plus a certain managerial nostalgia for the full desk, that reassuring sense of “seeing” people work even when seeing them tells you nothing about the work they do.

The paradox of freelancers summoned on site

There is one distortion I find genuinely hard to stomach, and it concerns freelancers. Asking an external collaborator for constant office presence is an almost comic contradiction. A freelancer is not an employee: they bring their own portfolio, references, and legal setup, and the value they offer lies in the result, not in the hours spent under the client’s gaze, as I wrote in Hiring a freelancer vs. an FTE.

And yet it happens that you are asked to come in for a call that could have been handled perfectly from home, perhaps the very call that the employees sitting two desks over also join by video. You pay for the commute, you lose time, you occupy a workstation, all to simulate a presence that adds nothing to the work. For someone like me, who chose professional freedom partly to manage time and energy, it is a request that strips the freelancing bargain of its meaning, a theme I also touch on in Freelancing and Networking and in The Importance of Wellness at Work.

When “remote” means “near the office”

The latest trick, the one that makes me wrinkle my nose every time, is the job posting. You read “remote,” you get excited, you apply, and only well into the interview do you discover that you actually have to live not too far from the office, because “now and then you need to drop by.” Remote thus becomes a marketing label to attract candidates, stripped of its meaning. It is a small deception that captures the confusion of the moment well: companies know flexibility attracts, but they are not willing to truly grant it.

And Europe? It is trying, but a real law is not there yet

It is worth clearing up a point that is often told badly: as of today, there is no binding European directive or regulation on remote work. What exists is an open construction site. The European social partners, unions, and employer organizations had started negotiating a binding agreement on telework and the right to disconnect back in 2022. Still, the talks collapsed in 2023 because the employers’ side blocked the deal.

From there, the Commission picked the file back up. In July 2025, it opened the second-stage consultation of social partners on “fair telework and the right to disconnect,” with responses due by October 6 2025. That is the step from which a future directive could emerge, but for now it remains a possibility, not a rule. Meanwhile, on December 2 2025,, the education sector signed an autonomous agreement on telework and disconnection that recognizes its voluntary nature, equal treatment, reimbursement of equipment, and health and safety aspects: a good signal, though limited to a single sector. On the national front, countries such as Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and France have already adopted right-to-disconnect rules. Europe, in short, is moving in the right direction, just far more slowly than the debate would have you believe.

What we take away

The arc of remote work, from lockdown normality to contested rarity, cannot be explained by productivity, because the numbers say the opposite. It is explained by control, by the need to justify past choices, and by a managerial nostalgia that dies hard. Meanwhile, workers have figured out what works for them, and a sizable share is willing to switch employers to keep it. The few organizations that have understood this and that treat flexibility as a tool rather than a concession will end up with the best professionals in their hands. The others will keep filling offices with people who, on a video call, are talking to someone on the other side of the world anyway.

Related sources

• Smart Working Observatory, Politecnico di Milano, 2025 data on 3.57 million flexible workers in Italy: https://www.osservatori.net/comunicato/smart-working/smart-working-italia-numeri-trend/
• Geopop, “Smartworking in crisi e ritorno in ufficio: cause, dati Eurostat e licenziamento silenzioso delle aziende”: https://www.geopop.it/smartworking-in-crisi-e-ritorno-in-ufficio-cause-dati-eurostat-e-licenziamento-silenzioso-delle-aziende/
• Fortune, “More than half of Fortune 100 desk workers are mandated to return to work fully”: https://fortune.com/2025/07/18/return-to-office-hybrid-work-fortune-100-companies/
• Founder Reports, “Essential Return-to-Office Statistics and Trends (2026)”: https://founderreports.com/return-to-office-statistics/
• Nicholas Bloom, Stanford, “Hybrid work is a win-win-win for companies and workers”: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/hybrid-work-is-a-win-win-win-for-companies-workers
• IMF Finance & Development, Nicholas Bloom, “Working from home is powering productivity”: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/working-from-home-is-powering-productivity-bloom
• CompanionLink, “Return-to-Office Wars: How Monitoring Data Fueled the 2025 Corporate Revolt”, on the real reasons behind the return: https://www.companionlink.com/blog/2025/05/return-to-office-wars-how-monitoring-data-fueled-the-2025-corporate-revolt/
• University of Pittsburgh research on RTO mandates following stock declines, summarized in Archie’s RTO statistics review: https://archieapp.co/blog/return-to-office-statistics/
• European Commission, “Commission starts second-stage talks with social partners on right to disconnect and fair telework” (July 2025): https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-starts-second-stage-talks-social-partners-right-disconnect-and-fair-telework-2025-07-25_en
• European Commission, “EU education sectoral social partners sign autonomous agreement on telework and the right to disconnect” (December 2025): https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/eu-education-sectoral-social-partners-sign-autonomous-agreement-telework-and-right-disconnect-2025-12-02_en