Remote / distributed work

Jack Nilles developed the concept of telecommuting while working on a NASA communication systems project in 1973. He published The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff in 1976, arguing that the daily commute was an inefficiency that technology could eliminate. The oil crisis of 1973 gave the idea temporary urgency, but the infrastructure to support widespread remote work did not yet exist.

By the 2000s and 2010s, companies in the technology sector began experimenting with distributed work. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, operated as a fully distributed company with employees in more than 70 countries and no central office. GitLab, founded in 2011, built one of the largest all-remote companies in the world and published a publicly accessible handbook documenting its remote work practices in over 2,000 pages.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 forced the largest unplanned experiment in remote work in history. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, who had studied remote work for years before the pandemic, found in his ongoing research that working from home had stabilized at roughly 25 to 30 percent of paid full workdays in the United States by 2023, compared to approximately 5 percent before the pandemic.

The debate over remote work's long-term viability has produced conflicting evidence. Some studies, including Bloom's own research, found productivity remained stable or improved for many remote workers. Others, including a 2023 study published in Nature, found that fully remote work reduced collaborative innovation as measured by patent citations. The question of whether remote work enhances or diminishes productivity depends on the type of work, the quality of management, and the individual worker's circumstances.