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Key Takeaways Remote work isn’t a pandemic anomaly — it’s a permanent shift reshaping hiring, culture and competitiveness.
Hybrid models now dominate, balancing flexibility employees want with collaboration leaders still value.
Companies resisting flexible work risk losing talent, productivity and long-term market relevance.
Do you ever long for those simpler days of the pre-pandemic workplace, where your entire team performed their jobs onsite every day? Where all-hands meetings could be called at a moment’s notice, with all your employees centralized in one spot?
Where you were forced to add more office cubes to ensure that everyone had a workstation? For most businesses and for many reasons, those days are unlikely to return. However, one of the biggest drivers of the modern office dynamic is the explosion of the remote work employment model.
While the trend toward remote work had been building for several decades before COVID-19, it was the shutdowns and safer-at-home mandates that thrust telework into the mainstay that it is today. During the crisis, remote work was the lifeline that kept people employed and business running, if not as usual, at least in a way that kept things going until things improved.
As challenging as it was, the flexibility that the remote work model afforded unlocked new opportunities for businesses. For instance, you could now hire a fully remote employee with the right skill set that you were unable to recruit locally, making your team stronger and more competitive. On the other hand, in-person time remained vital for fostering communication, building culture and strengthening collaboration.
So here we stand, with many companies now either encouraging or requiring their once-remote workforce to return to the office. Not surprisingly, there is notable pushback from many employees who adamantly prefer working remotely. And a hybrid model that tries to appease everyone, but that may also have its drawbacks.
Understanding the drivers that got us to this point and where we are headed is important as we navigate the future of remote work.
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