This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than six years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, more than 1 in 5 U.S. workers who can work remotely do so either full time or at least one day a week. Even though a new normal has set in, no single approach has worked for all employees.
And the debate over the benefits and drawbacks of remote work continues. To see what factors affected the long-term shift to remote and hybrid work that continued after the pandemic subsided, and to learn more about the pandemic's effects on research firms more broadly, I teamed up with my Babson College colleagues, Gina O'Connor and Jonathan Sims. We found that the process used to decide where employees should work matters just as much as the decision itself.
In early 2020, the research and development units of four global companies were conducting similar technical and scientific work. They all had access to the same communication technologies when COVID-19 upended everyone's routine. In keeping with social science research methods, we agreed not to name any of these companies.
As we learned through a series of interviews with senior leaders, project team leaders and team members from 2021 to 2023, all four companies told most of their employees to work from home in March 2020. What unfolded over the next three years in how and where employees would work as waves of COVID-19 came and went—remote, on-site or hybrid—differed in the time it took the companies to arrive at stable work arrangements and the degree to which workers agreed with them. Other research into how likely an employer is to allow remote and hybrid work arrangements after the pandemic has focused on executives' traits, such as their age and personalities.
But we've found that these choices regarding where employees work can have more to do with an employer's organizational culture: the set of assumptions, beliefs and norms that shape how people who work together make decisions and interact with each other. A Stanford University research team found in another study published in 2026 that the average percentage of paid full days worked from home shot from 7% shortly before the pandemic began to more than 60% soon after it started; the share of days spent working remotely then declined over the next two years to roughly 30%. We noticed significant variations from this pattern among the four companies we studied.
For most scientists and technicians, fully remote work lasted between a few weeks and a few months. For the four companies we studied, it took 3–15 months to establish new stable work arrangements, sometimes with multiple workplace policy changes along the way. Second, managers and employees understood, agreed with and accepted new work arrangements to very different degrees.
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