Is remote work a new phenomenon? Is it less valuable than in-office work?
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has grown rapidly. However, it’s not a new concept. Working from home has been around for much of human history.
Keep reading to look at the history of remote work, how it’s changed, and why it’s still valuable.
What Is Remote Work and Why Is It Valuable?
Remote work fundamentally changes how and where you contribute to your organization. In their book Remote, Fried and Hansson explain that rather than commuting to a central office, you can work from anywhere—decoupling your location from your productivity. This makes it possible for teams to spread across cities, countries, or even continents while still working together effectively. This shift is powered by technology that bridges the distance between team members. Video calls, screen sharing, project management apps, and cloud storage let you interact in real time or collaborate on your own schedule. These tools have made remote work viable for many knowledge-based jobs that once required everyone to be in the same physical space.
(Shortform note: The option to work remotely is unevenly distributed along socioeconomic lines. Workers earning above the 75th percentile are six times more likely to work remotely than those in the lowest quartile. This divide stems not just from job type—many roles in health care, retail, manufacturing, and agriculture can’t be performed remotely, though some can—but also from the need for dedicated space, reliable technology, and high-speed internet. As companies mandate returning to the office after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the flexibility to work remotely increasingly correlates with income: Remote work days have decreased 16% for workers earning $10,000-$100,000 but only 5% for those making $200,000 or more.)
Remote work comes in many forms. Fried and Hansson write that some companies have fully distributed operations with no central office at all, while others use hybrid models where employees might split their time between home and office. Some remote workers embrace the “digital nomad” lifestyle and travel constantly, while others simply work from their home office in the same city as their company’s headquarters. What connects all these approaches is the freedom from having to be physically present in a traditional office—instead, the focus shifts to what you produce, no matter where in the world you happen to be.
Remote Work has a Long History
While Fried and Hansson present remote work as revolutionary, the history of remote work goes far back—working away from centralized locations has deep historical roots. For most of human history, work and home were intertwined—our insistence on their separation is relatively recent. Before the Industrial Revolution, medieval craftspeople (like blacksmiths, bakers, and weavers) typically operated from workshops attached to their home, with entire families participating in production. This arrangement persisted for centuries, and some traditional home-based work continues today. Harris Tweed weavers in Scotland still craft from home—a tradition protected by law—receiving materials from mills and working on pedal-powered looms.
The Industrial Revolution shifted work to centralized factories, creating the office-centric model that dominated the 20th century. Yet some work remained distributed: Early 1900s “piece-work” allowed women to assemble parts of manufactured products at home, balancing work with family responsibilities. Modern “telecommuting” emerged in the 1970s during the oil crisis, with NASA engineer Jack Nilles coining the term. Technology has transformed this concept from telephone-and-fax reliance to today’s digital collaboration tools. What we’re witnessing may be both a return to historical working patterns and a leap forward—making the office-centric 20th century the true anomaly in work’s evolution.
Yet today’s purest form of remote work—“digital nomadism”—reveals tensions in this historical continuum. While remote craftspeople traditionally served their local communities, modern digital nomads often bring high salaries from wealthy nations to lower-cost areas, creating what anthropologists call “transnational gentrification.” The privilege of global mobility largely benefits already-advantaged knowledge workers, with the digital nomad community remaining predominantly white and western. As we reconnect with distributed work, critics say we must be mindful not to recreate colonial patterns of economic extraction and displacement.
Why Remote Work Makes Sense for Many Organizations
Traditional offices can make it surprisingly difficult to get meaningful work done. Fried and Hansson point out that constant meetings, unexpected conversations, and other distractions break up your day, making it hard to achieve the deep focus you need for complex tasks. Remote work solves this problem by letting you work with fewer interruptions in an environment that suits your personal productivity style.
| The Pros and Cons of Interruptions Research shows that our brains require 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption, and the average office worker gets interrupted every 11 minutes. Because of this, many workers exist in a perpetual state of divided attention. But a paradox occurs with distractions: They can lead to serendipitous moments of collaboration. For instance, the office of industrial research laboratory Bell Labs was designed by architect Eero Saarinen to spark unexpected interactions between scientists of different disciplines. This contrasts with how the same building is portrayed in the TV series Severance, in which it’s transformed into a dystopian workplace where departments are siloed, “interdepartmental fraternization” is forbidden, and the elimination of workplace distractions results in the stifling, rather than nurturing, of innovation. |
Fried and Hansson argue that beyond the core benefit of enabling greater focus, remote work offers several compelling advantages.
