This is part two of No Matter Who Wins, a three-part series about positive changes that will likely continue regardless of the outcome of the 2024 US election. Read part one here, and read part 3 here.
No matter what happens this election season, some movements will continue blazing forward. One of those is the unstoppable trajectory of the modern workplace, which is growing more equitable, more employee-focused — and more remote-friendly — by the year.
There have been a number of tectonic shifts in workplace dynamics over the past decade. Remote and flexible work options; onsite childcare; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs; and pay-transparency initiatives are all on the rise. All these shifts transfer more power into the hands of employees, making the workplace better — and more welcoming to more types of people.
The rise of remote work
While the American workplace has gotten more equitable in dozens of subtle ways, the shift to remote work remains one of the clearest and most obvious. Though the concept of remote work has been around for decades, the trend famously took off during the pandemic. With social distancing in place, companies had no other choice but to develop systems to allow people to work from anywhere. At the time, many workers thought of it as a temporary measure. And post-pandemic, some big companies — including Google, Amazon, Patagonia and Chipotle — indeed required workers to come back to the office. But workplace researchers and consultants say that’s not any indication of a trend reversal: Remote work and other more flexible and equitable work options are here to stay.
Laurel Farrer, co-founder and CEO of remote workplace consultancy Distribute Consulting, is particularly bullish about the future of distributed workplaces.
Yes, she admits, there will be more return-to-office mandates. However, those will mostly be from large companies with hefty real estate holdings or long-term leases — sunk costs that higher-ups are loath to write off as losses. Meanwhile, the companies that can afford to scale down their real estate holdings continue to do so; the square footage of new commercial office leases dropped by more than half between 2020 and 2022. Because while select Fortune 500 companies might be able to force their employees to come back to the office, smaller businesses haven’t been as successful, Farrer said.
“Remote work continues to be a source of negotiation power for workers,” Farrer says. “Every time a company announces a return-to-office mandate, the attrition rate is around 40 percent of top talent. That’s a massive cost.”
It’s also a massive indicator of the level of empowerment American workers currently have. In the wake of the pandemic, many industries woke up to workplace injustices, particularly among frontline workers and health care workers. The “Great Resignation” ensued, a year-long period in which the resignation rate in the US reached a 20-year high. About 47 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021, citing low pay, disrespect and insufficient benefits. The trend left workers with a greater sense of empowerment and newfound confidence to negotiate — one of the longer-lasting positive outcomes of the pandemic.
Plus, many industries have found that remote work is actually better for business. Recent research from Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom found that remote workers are more productive and less likely to quit their jobs. For that reason, many smaller and more progressive companies are starting to come around to the idea of a fully remote future.
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Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for.“The small- and medium-sized business market is exploding with remote work,” Farrer says. “More than 90 percent of businesses created since 2011 are all virtual-first. So as these companies continue to grow, there will continue to be more and more remote jobs.”
According to Harvard Business School researcher Prithwiraj Choudhary, about 30 percent of all jobs across the American economy are now digital or remote, and that number has remained steady for about a year and a half. “Pre-pandemic, it was about five percent,” he notes.
More equitable hiring
The proportion of American companies that are fully remote or distributed is only going to grow, said Farrer — and that’s a good thing, especially for workplace equity.
“Think about who has the flexibility to go back into an office,” she says. “That’s singles, young people and people with enough money to commute every day. So what you’re doing by making people come into an office is automatically putting rural residents, caretakers and older workers at a disadvantage.”
Remote work, however, evens the playing field. It gives everyone access to the same workflows regardless of their location, home life or time zone. And, Farrer says, it gives workers more autonomy and flexibility. It makes professionals feel trusted and gives them more control over their schedules.
According to Choudhury, going remote also makes it easier to acquire diverse talent. When a job is remote, your hiring pool broadens tremendously. And a wider range of people are likely to apply.
“There’s actually now really strong scientific evidence on that,” Choudhury says. “When the job posting is remote, in contrast to in-person, that job posting attracts more women, more minorities and applicants from a larger number of geographic locations.”
The benefits of remote work for women are particularly striking. In a recent study, Choudhury interviewed employees of the US Patent Office, which has had remote-work policies in place since 1997 and is now almost entirely remote. He found that many women in dual-career households struggled to maintain career continuity. That’s because women are more likely to move for their husbands’ jobs than they are to ask their husband to move for them.
“Typically the male partner moves and the female partner just has to go and figure it out,” Choudhury says. “So having a work-from-anywhere option means you don’t have to change your job just because your partner needs to move.” The military spouses he interviewed were equally grateful to have remote jobs; they were able to follow their partners from city to city without having to find a new job every two to three years. Likewise, women (and men) who have children or act as caretakers can continue to fulfill those obligations all while having a stable, high-paying career.
More options for parents
While remote-work policies give parents more flexibility, they don’t address the high cost of child care — a so-called “motherhood penalty” that has forced around 10 percent of new parents to quit their jobs (the trend mostly affects mothers, but can also impact fathers). Fortunately, more workplaces today offer programs to combat that inequity.
According to one recent study, the prevalence of on-site child care grew from just 8.5 percent in 2020 to 13.9 percent in 2023. That’s helped more parents stay in the workforce after having a child, improving their odds of both career progression and higher lifetime earnings.
Parental leave benefits are also getting more common — and more generous. In 2024, Colorado began requiring parental leave for fathers as well as mothers. And many employers are also expanding their leave policies, some offering as many as 24 weeks of paid time off for new parents, regardless of gender or birthing status.
DEI initiatives
This renewed focus on hiring more women and more workers of traditionally underrepresented populations is a relatively new one. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, many white hiring managers woke up to the racial disparities and inequities that have long been rampant throughout the US workforce. In addition to implementing the equity benefits of remote work — like broadening the net and permitting remote workers to stay in their home communities — many workplaces also adopted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Some started relationships with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to create new hiring pipelines. Others hired staff DEI officers to help improve workplace culture.
Some of these cultural changes would have been unimaginable in corporate America even a decade ago. Many workplaces, for example, abolished their bans on natural hair, like afros or locs. These bans were initially implemented under the guise of encouraging a “tidy” appearance at the office, but they actually carried strong racist undertones. It’s also now more commonplace for leaders to receive unconscious bias training or to be schooled on the benefits of inclusive language.
Pay transparency
Talking salary in the workplace was once considered taboo. Today, more companies are realizing that keeping salaries under wraps is simply a way of keeping employees from truly understanding their worth. According to data from Indeed, nearly 60 percent of employers now post salary ranges on job postings, a policy that protects new hires from getting lowballed.
Many companies are also making payroll numbers visible to employees internally. That incentivizes hiring managers to offer the same amounts to new hires, regardless of gender, ethnicity or other factors. This is a valuable check-and-balance, and it’s been shown to help narrow the gender pay gap. Pay transparency also gives workers more power when it comes to negotiating their own wages during performance reviews.
All in all, more workplaces are paying more attention to the experiences of non-white, non-male workers. There’s plenty of work to be done in this area, but more companies are striving to provide equal challenge and opportunity to more people of different backgrounds.
The benefits to communities
DEI and work-from-home policies don’t just benefit workers; they also benefit the communities those workers reside in. Hiring a more diverse talent pool helps spread resources across more sectors of society. And that could be even more true when that talent pool is remote.
Because remote workers aren’t tethered to a particular city, many settle in smaller towns — often scenic or rural areas that offer a higher quality of life. Some of these places might not otherwise have a varied workforce or young population with significant disposable income. That makes the arrival of remote workers enormously valuable.
In the US, some cities advertise financial incentives to attract this pool of newcomers. Tulsa, Oklahoma, famously offered $10,000 to new residents to lure remote workers to the city. And it worked: Recent data indicates that many of the 1,200 new recruits are happy with their new digs, and they plan to settle in Tulsa for good.
Other remote workers use the flexibility to volunteer abroad while making a steady salary. Some also choose to live the “digital nomad” life, bouncing from country to country. More than 60 nations around the world — including Canada, Brazil, Italy and Spain — now offer special visas to attract remote workers the same way Tulsa has, says Choudhury.
“When remote workers move in, you no longer have just one industry or one type of talent pool in a single area,” Farrer says. “That creates more economic stability.”
Reversing brain drain
The “digital nomad” approach applies to remote employees who are mobile. But for the many workers who can’t leave their hometowns because of family obligations, cultural preferences or community ties, remote work provides a way for them to stay where they are without sacrificing their careers.
“Remote work and virtual jobs are a huge strategy in economic development for rural communities,” Farrer says. “It allows younger, emerging talent to stay in the same place, but also to have stronger earning potential so that tax revenue is stronger for the community.”
Thanks in part to the rise in remote work, workplace conditions in the US have improved drastically over the past five years. Workers now have more autonomy than ever before, hiring is more equitable and communities have more options to attract — and retain — the people that make them vibrant and strong. And while some big companies might be wringing their hands over the impending end to office life, most employees are looking forward to the new world of work.
“We’re looking at a huge deconstruction of the power of institutions,” Farrer says. “Remote work takes that power — and gives it to the employees instead.”
