More than six years after COVID, most of us are working remotely in one way or another. Whether it’s fully remote, hybrid, or just when a kid is sick or a doctor’s appointment is unavoidable, we all are engaging virtually with our colleagues, our clients, and our work itself.
Still, the remote work conversation can be emotive, personality-driven, and chaotic with every new headline. In June, a New York Times opinion essay argued that work-from-home policies have deepened Americans’ isolation and distress. Days earlier, Fortune covered new Federal Reserve research suggesting that remote work, not AI, is behind rising unemployment among young college graduates.
All while The Wall Street Journal reported that despite high-profile return-to-office mandates, remote work rates have settled into a durable new equilibrium, with roughly a quarter of all paid workdays now happening at home.
Remote Work Has Plenty Of Research — But No Real Playbook
These headlines confirm something we already knew — remote work is being researched. Leaders like Nick Bloom and his colleagues at Stanford have advanced this long before remote work was fashionable to study. Brian Elliott made pioneering contributions at Slack, where he helped leaders around the world rethink flexibility. Mark Ma at the University of Pittsburgh has repeatedly examined contentious questions around return-to-office mandates. And Emma Harrington at the University of Virginia has illuminated both the promise and the trade-offs of distributed work.
But are we using it?
With all of this impressive body of research, why does the discourse feel so fragmented? Important, peer-reviewed studies are scattered across institutions, journals, and news cycles, each seized upon to confirm a policy decision that’s likely already been made. What’s missing is not research — it’s a home for it.
That’s why the teams at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Tulsa Remote have teamed together to launch the Remote Work Institute to identify, articulate, and advance the unique value of remote work for employers, employees, and communities.
The thesis behind this Institute is to find where remote work uniquely fits within the ecosystem of working environments. Who does it empower the most? Who needs more support? What does it do for towns and cities of a certain size? How does it impact the labor market? Are there best practices for virtual culture building? What projects are best accomplished remotely?
Answers to these questions need to be codified into the lexicon of organizational leadership and more regularly cited in the decisions we make. We can’t shoot from the hip anymore. People’s lives and careers are at stake.
Turning Remote Work Research Into Better Workplace Decisions
To answer these questions and more, we have assembled an impressive board of advisors who are shaping the future of work from academia, industry, and non-profits, but we’re not leaving it to ourselves. The Institute has launched an international call for proposals, inviting scholars around the world to submit academically rigorous, practically grounded research on remote and distributed work, including:
- Adoption, Trends, and the Evolution of Work
- The Changing Nature of the Firm and Workplace
- The Interplay of Technology and Remote/Distributed Work
- Productivity, Performance, and Innovation
- Worker Outcomes and Experience
- Dynamics in Virtual and Distributed Teams
- Labor Markets, Talent, and Workforce Dynamics
- Regional, Economic, and Community Impacts
- Equity, Access, and Inclusion
The result is a more balanced conversation and a better way to decide when to work remotely, and how.
The question is no longer whether remote work is good or bad: it’s for whom, for what, and under which conditions it works best. Those are empirical questions, and they deserve empirical answers. The workplace of the next decade will be designed either by evidence or by anecdote. We’re betting on evidence, and we invite the world’s researchers, leaders, and workers to help us build it.
