Before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, 17 percent of U.S. employees worked from home 5 days or more per week, a share that increased to 44 percent during the pandemic. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the remote working trend, as quarantines and lockdowns made commuting and working in an office close to impossible for millions around the world. Remote work, also called telework or working from home (WFH), provided a solution, with employees performing their roles away from the office supported by specialized technology, eliminating the commute to an office to remain connected with colleagues and clients. What enables working from home?

To enable remote work, employees rely on a remote work arrangements that enable hybrid work and make it safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology supporting remote work including laptops saw a surge in demand, video conferencing companies such as Zoom jumped in value, and employers had to consider new communication techniques and resources. Is remote work the future of work?

The response to COVID-19 has demonstrated that hybrid work models are not necessarily an impediment to productivity. For this reason, there is a general consensus that different remote work models will persist post-COVID-19. Many employers see benefits to flexible working arrangements, including positive results on employee wellness surveys, and potentially reducing office space. Many employees also plan on working from home more often, with 25 percent of respondents to a recent survey expecting remote work as a benefit of employment. As a result, it is of utmost importance to acknowledge any issues that may arise in this context to empower a hybrid workforce and ensure a smooth transition to more flexible work models.

The trend of working remotely has been slowly increasing globally since 2015, with a one to three percent annual increase rate. However, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 upended the world economy and global markets. Employment trends were no exception to this, with the share of employees working remotely increasing to some 27 percent in 2022 from just 13 percent two years prior. The industry with the highest share of remote workers globally in 2023 was by far the technology sector, with over 67 percent of tech employees worldwide working fully or mostly remotely. How are employers dealing with remote work? Many employers around the world have already adopted some remote work policies. According to IT industry leaders, reasons for remote work adoption ranged from a desire to broaden a company’s talent pool, increase productivity, and reduce costs from office equipment or real estate investments. Nonetheless, employers worldwide grappled with various concerns related to hybrid work. Among tech leaders, leading concerns included enabling effective collaboration and preserving organizational culture in hybrid work environments. Consequently, it’s unsurprising that maintaining organizational culture, fostering collaboration, and real estate investments emerged as key drivers for return-to-office mandates globally. However, these efforts were not without challenges. Notably, 21 percent of employers faced employee resistance to returning to the office, prompting a review of their remote work policies.

In April 2025, approximately 14 percent of workers in Great Britain worked from home exclusively, with a further 26 percent working from home and travelling to work, while 41 percent only travelled to work. During this time period, the share of people only travelling to work was highest in March 2022, at 60 percent of respondents, with the peak for only working from home occurring in June 2020. In general, hybrid working has become steadily more popular than fully remote working, with the highest share of people hybrid working in November 2023, when 31 percent of people advising they were hybrid working. What type of workers are most likely to work from home? In 2020, over half of people working in the agriculture sector mainly worked from home, which was the highest share among UK industry sectors at that time. While this industry was one of the most accessible for mainly working at home, just 6 percent of workers in the accommodation and food services sector mainly did this, the lowest of any sector. In the same year, men were slightly more likely to mainly work from home than women, while the most common age group for mainly working from home was those aged 75 and over, at 45.4 percent. Over a long-term period, the share of people primarily home working has grown from 11.1 percent in 1998, to approximately 17.4 percent in 2020. Growth of Flexible working in the UK According to a survey conducted in 2023, working from home either on a regular, or ad-hoc basis was the most common type of flexible working arrangement offered by organizations in the UK, at 62 percent of respondents. Other popular flexible working arrangements include the ability to work flexible hours, work part-time, or take career breaks. Since 2013, for example, the number of employees in the UK that can work flextime has increased from 3.2 million, to around 4.2 million by 2024. When asked why flexible work was important to them, most UK workers said that it supported a better work-life balance, with 41 percent expressing that it made their commute to work more manageable.

In 2021, 32 percent of respondents currently working at least partially outside of the office indicated that their company has a 100 percent remote policy. This is a slight increase from the previous year. Only 14 percent of respondents stated that remote work in their company is allowed but not the norm, down from 25 percent in 2020. Global shift to new work in 2020 In 2020, the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift from work in the office to work from home, to keep the workforce and the community safe. While this created some struggles in the beginning, many organizations and employees have since adapted and are thriving. Many employees appreciate the benefits of working remotely. Accordingly, one in two individuals indicate that the ability to work remotely is an important decision factor for future employment. Companies experiment with hybrid work models As a result, many companies worldwide are updating their policies to accommodate this new way of working. These include a combination of both flexibility on work location and productive in-person and digital collaboration opportunities. For this reason, organizations are not only actively monitoring both employee well-being and productivity but are also evolving operations to support a hybrid workforce.

In 2022, around 21 percent of respondents stated that their biggest struggle when working remotely was staying at home too often because there they don't have reason to leave. Moreover many people who work from home do not necessarily have a designated workspace, they experience a conflation between their living area and workplace. Most notably, around 15 percent of respondents reported loneliness as their biggest struggle with working remotely.

As a result, remotely working employees emphasize the importance of finding strategies to balance their private lives with their professional routines. On the other hand, employees also state having less difficulties with collaboration and communication in 2021. This is likely due to the quick cultivation of skills during the 2020 pandemic that allow them to effectively communicate and collaborate with others when working from different locations.

Challenges inherent in new work set-ups
As employees work from different locations, companies are confronted with the urgency to ease some of the challenges inherent in novel hybrid work solutions. Strategies developed to support remote work include training for employees or expanding information technology infrastructure to ensure that employees can collaborate efficiently from different locations.

The future of work
Certainly, it is important to take the challenges experienced by employees seriously as the current telework trend is likely to continue and become a common way of working in the future. Addressing challenges head-on in the present will ensure better working conditions in the future.

In the observed period, the number of people who usually work from home in Poland has increased. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the proportion of people working from home reached a record high of nearly nine percent in 2020.

  Pros and cons of working remotely 

  The introduction of the home office brought in several benefits but also pitfalls. More flexible work times were considered the key advantage of remote work. On the other hand, applying more self-discipline proved to be the most significant disadvantage of working from home. Regarding any other additional costs related to remote working, almost every second employee faced higher electricity costs.

  Freelancing in Poland 

   Most Polish freelancers work in copywriting and social media, whereas virtual assistance ranks among the least popular freelancing job sectors. Nevertheless, the share of Poles who earned over 5,000 zloty net per month from freelancing activities increased steadily over the years. In 2021, nearly 18 percent of Polish freelancers had a monthly net income exceeding that amount. Moreover, when it comes to approaches to freelancing activity in Poland, every second freelancer considered their freelance work an additional income source.

The percentage of people who mainly work from home in the United Kingdom reached 17.4 percent in 2020, compared with 14.2 percent in the previous year. Since 1998 the number of people that regularly work from home in the UK has increased by 2.73 million after the number of remote workers reached 5.6 million in 2020.

In 2023, the largest share of employees who preferred to work-from-home in the United States were those between 26 and 41 years old and totaled 41 percent of those surveyed within this age group. The age group with the least desire to work from home were between 18 and 25 years old.

Worldwide, one in four of employees working from home felt lonely a lot of the day in 2023. While working from home is a helpful way for many to efficiently manage stressful everyday lives, it can cause loneliness among some who do not see their colleagues in person.

In 2023, almost 44 percent of employees in Sweden worked from home, barely three percent less than during the outbreak of COVID-19. The share of employees working from home in Sweden increased gradually over the last decade. Moreover, the share of Swedish employees working from home was above the EU average, with over 22 percent in 2023.

A survey conducted in 2022 found that members of Generation Z were the least likely to say they were just as productive when working from home versus working in the office. In contrast, nearly three times the number of Baby Boomers said they were just as productive working from home versus the office.

Hybrid models of working are on the rise in the United States according to survey data covering worker habits between 2019 and 2024. In the second quarter of 2024, 53 percent of U.S. workers reported working in a hybrid manner. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a record number of people working remotely to help curb the spread of the virus. Since then, many workers have found a new shape to their home and working lives, finding that a hybrid model of working is more flexible than always being required to work on-site.

In 2023, the share of employees who worked from home was around 36 percent in Denmark. As expected, the share of employees working from home increased significantly from 2019 to 2020 after the outbreak of COVID-19. It reached 37 percent in 2020. This is around 17 percentage points higher than the EU average that year. In Denmark, however, this share only slightly lowered in the years following the outbreak.

As of 2023, 8.9 percent of employed people in the European Union usually worked from home. This share of home-office workers varied widely between European countries, with a 21 percent of finish workers usually working from home, compared to only one percent of Romanian workers. It was in general more common for women to work from home usually than men, however, this was notably reversed in some countries, such as Ireland where almost 23 percent of men regularly worked from home.

In 2021, 36 percent of respondents working from home state that their intenert connection is slower than in the office. Overall, working from home has not brought many tech issues to employees. Notably, those issues frequently experienced by employees are connection based.

With 56 percent, most respondents state they have been working remotely for less than a year. This is the case as many employees around the world had been pushed out of the office and into their home for work due to COVID-19. As a result of these circumstances, many of these employees identify as remote workers now.

In a June 2020 survey, participants that worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic were asked what they thought were the greatest sources of distraction. Among the respondents, 53.7 percent said that their smartphones were affecting their productivity during the lockdown. Additionally, 30.4 percent admitted that gaming was keeping them from their daily work responsibilities.

In 2020, approximately 5.6 million people worked mainly from home in the United Kingdom, an increase of around 1.69 million people when compared with 1998, when just 2.9 million workers mainly worked from home. As a share of all workers in the United Kingdom, this was the equivalent of 17.4 percent of the UK workforce, compared with 14.2 percent in 1998. Rise of the hybrid workforce More recent figures on working location trends in Great Britain, indicate that as of June 2024, around 14 percent of workers had worked from home exclusively in the last seven days, with a further 41 percent only travelling to work. Just over a quarter of British workers, however, had both worked from home and travelled to work in the last seven days. Although less common than only travelling to work, hybrid working has generally been more popular than only working at home since around Spring 2022, and is possibly one of the most enduring impacts that COVID-19 had on the labor market. Demographics of homeworkers While advancements in internet connectivity and communication software have enabled more people to work from home than ever before, there are still obvious disparities in the share of homeworkers by industry. Over half of the UK’s agriculture workforce in 2020 regularly worked from home, compared with just 5.6 percent of those that worked in accommodation or food service. In the same year, the region with the highest share of people working from home was South West England at 18.3 percent, while Northern Ireland had the lowest at just 9.4 percent.

A 2022 survey found that 35 percent of employed Americans have been offered full-time remote work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers across the U.S. began working remotely for the first time. The popularity of remote work has continued as pandemic restrictions have relaxed.

In September 2022, there were 8.28 million workers in the United States that worked from home sometime in the past four weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This accounts for those who teleworked, or worked at home, specifically because of the coronavirus pandemic and does not include those who worked from home before the pandemic.