How employers can make good decisions about remote work before the next crisis strikes

More than six years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, over 1 in 5 of the U.S. workers who can work remotely do so either full time or at least one day per 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 kept going 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.

Facing the same challenge

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 to not 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 terms of how they arranged how and where employees would work as waves of COVID-19 came and went – remote, on-site or hybrid – differed in terms of the time it took them 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.

Attaining stable work arrangements

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.

By early 2023, middle managers and workers at two of the four employers broadly accepted their companies’ work-from-home policies. At one of the other two, workers generally accepted it; at the other one, employees rejected the policies and were finding work-arounds to policies they disagreed with.

Being hierarchical or collaborative

Because it develops slowly over years, organizational culture is hard to change. When a crisis strikes, that culture acts like a script that determines which decisions feel possible and which seem untenable.

We found that organizational culture determined how quickly an employer succeeded at establishing a new balance between remote, on-site and hybrid work after the earliest phase of the pandemic had passed.

Two of the employers established procedures and enforced clear lines of authority and rules regarding when employees could work from home. A research director at one of these highly hierarchical companies described the pandemic as “just another risk that needed to be managed” using existing protocols. These employers stabilized work arrangements quickly, and employees understood “the rules.”

The other two emphasized teamwork and participation, welcoming employee input in decisions. One of the two companies with collaborative cultures held workshops about the use of remote work, which included employees at every level – ensuring that all employees would understand what was being done and why.

Both kinds of cultures had strengths and weaknesses during and after the pandemic.

The hierarchical companies moved faster but struggled more with managerial issues over workplace policies when many of their employees felt their concerns were not heard. In contrast, the collaborative companies took longer to decide on their workplace policies but encountered less pushback from their employees.

Organizational culture can shape and limit an employer’s decisions during a crisis. Because developing a culture that is more flexible takes time, we believe employers should consider getting started on that process long before the next crisis hits and disrupts many work routines.