Working from home isn’t just here to stay, it’s growing

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness by working from home (WFH).

Okay, that’s not exactly how the Declaration of Independence goes. But, it is how many tech workers feel these days.  According to the 2025 Cisco Global Hybrid Work StudyOpens a new window , 63% of workers would take a pay cut if they could work from home more often.

Sara Thomas, a strategic HR leader and advisor at Mother CoverOpens a new window , said this “echoes what I’ve been seeing consistently across the market: flexibility is no longer a perk, it’s a baseline expectation.”

The perks of WFH are hard to deny

I’m not the least bit surprised. I’ve been working from home for more years than some of you have been alive. I used to live in Washington, DC, and commute to work in Manhattan via Amtrak. Then, I moved to Asheville, NC in 2001. At the time, I told my employer, then, as now, Spiceworks’ parent company, Ziff Davis, that if they really needed me in the office, I could always fly up to NYC, but I doubt I’d ever need to do so. Twenty-four years later, I’ve never had to run up there for work. There was never any need.

As Peter Tsai, the Head of Technology Insights at Spiceworks, wrote a few months ago, many more people got to find out if remote work would work for them when “The COVID-19 pandemic was a worldwide experiment that fundamentally changed how we work today” by forcing many more of us to work remotely. Many of us then discovered that we liked working remotely… a lot.

Why wouldn’t we? Who wouldn’t rather “commute” for less than a minute to a kitchen laptop than half an hour to an office desktop? Or be able to work a flexible 8-hour schedule rather than a 9-to-5? Or, as a result, being able to juggle work and personal life without breaking a sweat? And last but never least, who doesn’t like simply saving money by not paying for gas, parking fees, or lunches?

As Thomas observed, “The ability to work remotely, even part of the time, has been transformative. It gives people back valuable time, offers greater autonomy, and supports a healthier integration of work and life.”

WFH works for IT, too

Many Spicework readers agree. In a community survey, 52% of respondents said they plan to work either fully remotely or with a hybrid remote/office work in 2025. It’s not just Spiceworks folks. The job research company Robert Half found 43% of tech job postings were for fully remote or hybrid jobsOpens a new window .

That’s because our work, whether you’re a developer, IT support tech, or data analyst, can be done entirely online. So long as we have a computer, an Internet connection, and cloud-based tools, we’re ready to work.

Of course, it’s not all fun and games working from home. When the only co-worker is your cat, you can feel isolated. On the other hand, as another Spiceworks survey revealed, a majority of IT workers feel isolated anyway. As CraiGrrr spoke, I suspect, for many of us, when he wrote, “I’m a dev, so the rules are: leave me alone and let me work, pay me, give me a donut every now and then, and again for those in the back; leave me alone.” Been there, felt that, and no, I don’t want to go to your meeting.

Indeed, an older Spiceworks conversation revealed that a common theme for what bugged techies working in offices the most was the constant flood of walk-in requests, impromptu meetings, and annoying coworkers. Many people reported that they could focus more on their work when they’re at home. After all, Fluffy may sit on your keyboard, but he’s not going to give a blow-by-blow description of who’s dating whom at the top of his voice.

The numbers for WFH don’t lie

As Curtis Sparrer, principal and co-founder of Bospar, a remote-only tech PR company, said, remote work is a win for the bottom line. “Executives may want us to believe their workers are more productive at an office, but study after study – including research from the Federal Reserve – reveals that’s just not the case.Opens a new window “

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) paper “The Rise in Remote Work Since the Pandemic and Its Impact on ProductivityOpens a new window ,” people working from home delivered better-quality work than they did from the office. In particular, over 60% of the workforce working remotely in data processing, internet publishing, and other information services, and computer systems design and related services, saw the biggest productivity gains during the COVID-19 years of 2020-2022.

Despite that, many bosses aren’t convinced. Why? The Anglo-American business advisory company WTW, in a survey of corporate leaders, found that they believe “that face-to-face interactions boost employee engagementOpens a new window within teams, strengthen corporate culture, and increase collective productivity by promoting personal interaction of teams.”

Nonetheless, by the BLS’s count, about 10.1% of full-time employees in the U.S. now work entirely from homeOpens a new window , while another 11.5% work some hours remotely. Other statistics, such as Gallup’s, which measures the percentage of jobs that can be done remotely, show that 27% of these jobs are being done full-time remotelyOpens a new window , with at least 53% being performed using a hybrid work model.

That said, WTW also found that “Employees’ desire for remote work has also increased. According to WTW’s Global Benefit Attitudes SurveyOpens a new window , “53% of employees that have work that can be done remotely indicated they would look to change jobs within 12 months if their employer mandated a full-time return-to-office policy. Almost half (48%) of hybrid and remote workers reported they would be willing to take a pay cut of 8% on average to have work flexibility.”

The tension is real. A Statista study found that 91% of employees who worked remotelyOpens a new window prefer to work fully or almost completely remotely. At the same time, a KPMG CEO survey revealedOpens a new window that 83% saw a full return to the office in the next few years.

Treating your employees like adults

Another aspect of this is that workers feel that when a company insists they return to the office, what they’re really saying is that they don’t trust them to do their work. Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner, observed, “We have seen employees explicitly offer to take pay cuts to stay remote, but the real tension we have seen isn’t over salary but more over autonomy. People want to be trusted to do great work from wherever they’re most productive, and when that trust is lacking, it leads to disengagement more than negotiation.”

Nevertheless, many tech companies, such as Amazon, Dell, Apple, and- oh the irony!-ZoomOpens a new window now insist workers must return to the officeOpens a new window .

Or do they really want you back at the water-cooler? For example, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said that all Amazon workers must return to the officeOpens a new window because “teams tend to be better connected to one another.” The company somehow managed not to have enough office spaceOpens a new window even months after the announcement. Seven months later, I’m told by Amazon employees who prefer to remain anonymous for job security reasons, that this is still a problem. I reached out to Amazon directly for a comment and received no response.

Is what AWS, and other Return to Office (RTO) firms, really want is not so much butts in seats as to reduce headcount without severance costs? That’s exactly what Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist, thinks is happening. “Amazon hired very aggressively in 2021-22 with the rebound from the pandemic, and suddenly discovered they just had too many employeesOpens a new window . And so, option one is to fire a bunch of folks, but you have to pay them severance pay. It’s expensive. People get very angry. So, option two, I think their view was, ‘Why don’t we call everyone back to the office for five days a week? Probably about 10% of people won’t like it. They live too far away. They’ll quit on us and that will save us a lot of money.’”

Amazon denies that’s its motive. Still, AWS CEO Matt Garman won’t cry if some employees quitOpens a new window . In an all-hands meeting, Garman said, “”If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around.”

Employees are not happy about the RTO push. Given their druthers, employees love working remotely. Indeed, the Owl Lab’s Remote work survey found that 40% would look for a new jobOpens a new window if they were forced to work full-time from the office.

In particular, over 70% of surveyed Amazon workers are considering quittingOpens a new window the technology giant. While Garman insisted that nine out of 10 workers approve of the new policy, the public protests about Amazon’s draconian RTO rulesOpens a new window tell another tale.

While this may be fine for Amazon, the moral of the story, according to Jamie SiejaOpens a new window , Director of Marketing at Flex HROpens a new window , for smaller companies is that “More and more small to midsize companies are going to have to be flexible with hybrid scheduling to retain their current employees and attract new ones. To avoid conflict, those employers requiring their staff to come into the office every day are going to have to add more perks to make the job attractive to new hires.” It might just be easier to let them work remotely in the first place.

RTO mandates have a cost

Besides, remarks Kacy Fleming, an organizational psychologist who advises Fortune 500 companies on employee retention, “Despite all the headlines about return-to-office mandates, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows remote work is actually increasing 22.8% of workers reported teleworking in August 2024, up from 19.5% the previous year. We’re not seeing the massive office return that gets all the media attention.”

Instead, “When companies do implement strict mandates, the research shows they’re shooting themselves in the foot. RTO mandates significantly hurt job satisfaction and lead to higher turnover among highly skilled and senior employees, exactly the people companies don’t want to lose.”

As for the argument that office workers are more productive than remote workers? Please! As Fleming states, “Stanford’s largest study of working-from-home professionalsOpens a new window found that hybrid employees are just as productive and as likely to get promoted as their fully office-based peers while dramatically boosting retention rates.”

What’s really going on, Fleming sees, “is that this conflict isn’t really about where we work, it’s about whether organizations are willing to evolve beyond traditional command-and-control management styles. The companies clinging to ‘butts in seats’ thinking are losing talent to competitors who’ve figured out that trust and outcomes matter more than physical presence.”

Eric Kingsley, a partner at Kingsley Szamet Employment LawyersOpens a new window , sees another reason why RTO doesn’t work. “While office work can be seen by employers as a way to keep an eye on productivity and company culture, employees want the flexibility, independence, and time benefits of remote work. We’re seeing increasingly frequent cases where return-to-office policies are being seen as retaliatory or discriminatory, especially when they’re not applied uniformly.”

There is something to this. For example, Robert Half’s job survey has found that the more senior you are, the more likely you are to find remote or hybrid job offers. That said, there are entry-level remote IT jobsOpens a new window available for junior software engineers, IT support specialists, and help desk technicians.

Interestingly, the research company McKinsey found that “Those with the most experience prefer working remotelyOpens a new window while those who are younger prefer more time in the office.” This trend, combined with companies’ increasing reliance on AI to automate entry-level jobs, suggests a future where there will be far fewer experienced tech workers to manage an increasingly complex world.

So, what does this mean for you and me? I think Robert Half, which watches the job market like a hawk, put it best. While fully remote job offers have stabilized at around 13%, hybrid job postings have grown from 9% in Q1 2023 to nearly a quarter (24%) of new jobs at the start of 2025, while entirely on-site roles are continuing to trend downward as hybrid options rise. So, in short, “flexible work arrangements are here to stay.” That works for me, and I hope it works for you too.