Yes to Working Remotely, No to working from Home

At our company, the return-to-office conversation has come back. The responses have been predictable enough to be useful: salespeople and some parents with small children seem more open to going in, while many people outside those groups lean remote. I do not read that as proof that one camp cares more about work. People are usually arguing from the shape of their actual day.

Sales roles often reward live energy, quick feedback, overheard context, and the pulse you get from being in a room with other people. Parents may want an office because the home has become too many places at once: school, kitchen, nursery, laundry room, Zoom room, quiet room, battlefield. Someone with a calm apartment, a good chair, and no one asking for a snack every eight minutes may look at the same office policy and see only a pointless commute. Each person is solving for a different friction.

The research matches that mixed picture. Gallup’s 2025 data shows that remote-capable workers are not stampeding back to the office five days a week: in Q2 2025, 51% were hybrid, 28% fully remote, and 21% fully on-site. Gallup also reports that six in ten remote-capable employees want a hybrid arrangement. Pew found that most people who work from home say it helps their work-life balance and their ability to meet deadlines, while 53% say it hurts their connection with co-workers. A 2024 randomized trial published in Nature found that a two-day-from-home hybrid schedule reduced quit rates by one-third without hurting performance.

My own experience sits somewhere in the middle. I believe in remote work, and I also know that my home is a mediocre place for me to do it every day. That surprised me, because I have a very good desk setup: proper monitor, good keyboard, nice chair, all the little optimizations a person can buy while pretending not to procrastinate. Even with that setup, my output drops when I work from home for too many days in a row.

The problem is the softness of the boundary. At home, there is no real entrance into the workday. There is no commute, no change of light, no room full of other people quietly signaling that the day has started. The fridge is there. The couch is there. Family is close enough to matter and far enough away to feel guilty about. No one knows if you took a nap. No one knows if you are wearing pants.

I used to treat the pants line as a joke, but it points at something real. Getting dressed is a small act of seriousness. Leaving the house creates a ritual. Sitting around other people who are also trying to get things done creates a mild, useful pressure. I do not mean surveillance or office theater. I mean the ordinary gravity of being in a place built for work.

Coworking has worked for me because it gives me that gravity without forcing my company to pretend every employee needs the same office. I get a place to go, some ambient accountability, and the useful friction of preparing myself for the day. Then, when I come home, I am actually home. My work improves, and my family gets less of the half-present version of me.

That family part matters more than I expected. The office debate usually gets framed as company needs versus employee freedom, which leaves out the question of whether work has colonized the rooms where the rest of life is supposed to happen. When my laptop is always on the dining table, work leaks into dinner, bedtime, and the corners of the day. When I leave to work somewhere else, I return with a cleaner line.

If I were designing company policy, I would be more interested in workspace budgets than universal office mandates. Something like a $500 monthly coworking stipend would be a practical way to support people whose best work happens away from home, without dragging everyone back to headquarters by default. The exact number should vary by market. The principle is what matters: help employees choose a serious place to work, whether that is a coworking space, a hotel work lounge, a local office hub, or a quiet room with decent Wi-Fi and other adults wearing pants. In Europe, I have had a great experience with ATworld, which gives members access to coworking spaces, cafés, hotel lounges, and work-friendly locations across many cities.

My own preference should not become everyone else’s policy. Plenty of people are more productive at home than they ever were in an office. Pew even found that parents with children under 18 are somewhat more likely than non-parents to say working from home helps their work-life balance, which complicates the simple story I might tell from my own company. That is healthy. Work policy gets better when it admits that people are living different lives.

For me, the best version of remote work includes a place outside the house. I need a door I can close behind me when the workday is over.

Source notes

• Gallup’s hybrid work indicator says most remote-capable U.S. employees are hybrid or fully remote, and that six in ten remote-capable employees want hybrid work. Its Q2 2025 topline shows 51% hybrid, 28% exclusively remote, and 21% fully on-site among remote-capable employees.
• Pew Research Center found that 71% of U.S. teleworkers say working from home helps them balance work and personal life, 56% say it helps them get work done and meet deadlines, and 53% say it hurts their ability to feel connected with co-workers.
• Bloom, Han, and Liang’s 2024 Nature randomized trial found that hybrid work reduced quit rates by one-third and did not damage performance grades, promotions, or lines of code written by engineers.
• NBER research across 27 countries estimated that working from home saved workers 72 minutes per day on average in commute time.
• Harvard Business Review reported that coworking members in their research showed unusually high levels of thriving compared with regular office employees.
• ATworld describes itself as a Europe-focused network for coworking spaces, cafés, hotel lounges, meeting rooms, and work-friendly hospitality locations.