The History of Remote Work

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

Picture a merchant in Prato, Tuscany, in the late 1300s. He cannot see his managers in Barcelona or Avignon. He cannot call them. Everything he knows about his business arrives on paper from other cities.

That is the first documented answer to a question teams still ask: how do you run work you cannot watch? Remote work as a named idea dates to 1973. The USC researcher Jack Nilles says he coined "telecommuting" and "teleworking" that year while studying how technology could replace the daily trip to the office. Working at a distance is far older. Merchants and cottage weavers did it for centuries, but they were precursors, not remote workers in the modern sense. The throughline is that the technology to work from anywhere arrived decades before managers trusted it. Each shock, from the 1970s oil crisis to 2020, moved the line a little further.

Timeline at a Glance

The Letter and the Loom (1300s-1850s)

Merchants and weavers work where the owner can't see

Francesco di Marco Datini lived from 1335 to 1410 and ran his trade from Prato and Florence, with satellite offices called fondaci in Pisa, Genoa, Avignon, Barcelona, Valencia and Palma de Mallorca. The Wesleyan Traveler's Lab, describing the Datini collection held at the State Archives of Prato, counts about 143,000 letters between almost 300 towns and cities, and about 108,000 of them carry enough detail to identify sender, recipient, origin, destination and dates. His company moved spices from the East through Venice to the western Mediterranean and North Sea and traded them for Spanish and English wool. Managers in far-off offices were not watched. They wrote, and the head office read, answered and kept the record.

A second precursor was quieter and closer to home. Under what historians call outwork or putting-out, which developed from the sixteenth century, a factor or trader bought raw material such as cotton, rural households (mostly women, in the Habsburg source's account) spun and wove it in their own homes, and the trader paid a piece rate for each item and sold the result. In Lower Austria's Waldviertel, up to 30,000 people did this work. It was paid labor done at home, managed by an intermediary, and measured by output rather than by hours in a building.

Neither was "remote work". The Datini firm kept real offices and fondaci, and the weavers were closer to contractors, with little say over rates. But both solved the same problem: the owner could not stand over the worker, so he relied on written records and payment by result. The factory and the office, which our history of the office traces, came later and brought the workers under one roof precisely because supervising by letter and piece rate was slow.

What it teaches teams today: distance has always pushed managers toward written records and measured output. Teams that skip both and rely on seeing people tend to struggle remotely.

Nilles's Tradeoff (1972-1983)

A rocket engineer asks why the commute exists

In 1972, by his own biography, Jack Nilles joined the University of Southern California as Director for Interdisciplinary Research and began formal research on telecommuting. His biography says he coined "telecommuting" and "teleworking" in 1973. That was the year of the OPEC oil crisis and soaring fuel prices, and The Conversation's account of his work places the study in that setting.

The study looked at a Los Angeles insurance company with more than 2,000 employees. Each worker, the same account says, traveled an average of 34.4 km a day at a cost of US$2.73 million a year in 1974 prices. Nilles's book, published in 1976, argued that technology would soon make decentralizing work more economical, and it concluded that "technology was not the limiting factor in the acceptance of telecommuting". The proposal was not working from the kitchen table. Few homes had computers, so the book focused on satellite offices closer to where people lived.

Employers began to test the home version a few years later. According to Jerry Useem's reporting in The Atlantic, republished by Government Executive, IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory put terminals in the homes of five employees in 1979 to ease a logjam at the office mainframe, and about 2,000 IBM employees worked remotely by 1983. The hardware that made this possible is the subject of our history of the personal computer, and the message channel that later carried the work is covered in the history of email.

The new problem was management. The technology worked, but the reason for it was commuting and fuel, not performance, and the case for trusting people out of sight was still unmade.

What it teaches teams today: the first business case for remote work was cost and logistics. Your own case should name its reason, whether that's hiring reach, commute time or space, before you set rules.

The Quiet Years (1984-2012)

Policy and pilots, but not the mainstream

For nearly three decades the idea advanced mostly in government and in a handful of large firms. In the United States, the Congressional Research Service notes that P.L. 106-346 of October 23, 2000 led the Office of Personnel Management to submit annual telework reports to Congress starting in 2002. Earlier laws directed agencies such as Commerce, Justice and State to designate telework coordinators. Several stand-alone telework bills in the 2000s did not pass.

That changed on December 9, 2010, when President Obama signed the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, Public Law 111-292. It requires each executive agency head to establish a telework policy within 180 days, and it defines telework as a work flexibility arrangement under which an employee performs the duties of the position from an approved worksite other than the usual one. Agencies had to sign written agreements with employees, name a Telework Managing Officer and train managers. Telework also had to be built into continuity-of-operations plans.

In companies, the idea grew unevenly. An IBM report from 2009, again as quoted by The Atlantic, said 40 percent of its roughly 386,000 employees in 173 countries had no office at all, and that IBM had shed more than 58 million square feet of office space. Meanwhile, the shared floors described in our history of the open-plan office were a different bet on how to organize office work.

The remaining problem was evidence. Nobody had run a controlled test, so each side argued from instinct.

What it teaches teams today: a law or a policy doesn't create a practice. The 2010 Act asked for agreements, training and continuity plans because remote work fails when it is improvised.

The Test and the Recall (2013-2019)

Randomized proof arrives the same month Yahoo says no

Two events in early 2013 pulled in opposite directions. On February 22, a memo from Yahoo's head of human resources, Jackie Reses, told employees that work-from-home was ending. In Boston University's account, the case was that "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home". Management professor Kathy Kram said it could hurt retention and morale, and suggested a middle path of set on-site days each week.

In March, the NBER circulated the first randomized test. Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying reported on Ctrip, a 16,000-employee Chinese travel agency. Call-center employees who volunteered were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for nine months. Home working produced a 13% performance increase, about 9 points from more minutes worked per shift and about 4 from more calls per minute, and workers reported more satisfaction and less turnover, though promotion rates fell. When Ctrip let the experimental group choose again, more than half switched, and the gains grew to 22%. One co-author, Liang, was Ctrip's CEO, a disclosure printed on the paper.

By 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 24 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked. Even IBM, the pioneer, was reversing. The Atlantic reports that in March 2017 it told about 5,000 remote workers to return to office workspaces.

The new problem was selection: those who volunteer for remote work are not typical workers, and the Ctrip result came from one call center. Collaborative, creative work had no such test.

What it teaches teams today: treat the choice of where people work as a measurable decision. Ctrip's gains grew when staff could re-select, which suggests that fit matters as much as policy.

The Great Experiment (2020-2022)

A pandemic moves the office into the house

In 2020 the question stopped being optional. BLS reports that the share of employed people working at home on days they worked nearly doubled, rising from 22 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2020 on a May-to-December comparison. The annual 2019 figure on a full-year basis was 24 percent. The next year, BLS found it was 38 percent in 2021 and 34 percent in 2022, and noted that workers were still more likely to work at home than in 2019.

The tools were ready in a way they had not been in Nilles's time. Our history of office software shows how documents, chat and video moved to shared servers, and the history of collaboration tools tells that part in more detail. What was not ready was management. Managers who had judged by presence now had to judge by output, a shift that connects to the history of productivity measurement and to the knowledge work that most remote jobs involve.

The work that grew out of it has its own guidance in our pieces on remote work productivity and async communication.

What it teaches teams today: the barrier to remote work was never mainly technology. The 2020 shift happened in days once leaders had no choice, so what you call a technical limit is often a habit.

The Hybrid Settlement (2023-present)

Two or three days at home becomes the default

The shock faded but did not fully reverse. BLS says that in 2025, 35 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked. Barrero, Bloom and Davis, in their NBER paper "Why Working from Home Will Stick," describe work from home as having stabilized at about 25% of all paid workdays as of 2025. The most common arrangement is a hybrid week.

In 2024 Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang published the hybrid test in Nature. Their six-month randomized trial of 1,612 employees at a Chinese technology company, run in 2021 and 2022, found that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by one-third, with no effect on performance grades or promotions over the following two years. The 395 managers in the trial moved from expecting a 2.6% negative effect on productivity to a 1.0% positive one.

Pressure from the other side persists. On January 20, 2025, a presidential memorandum told agency heads to "terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person" on a full-time basis, subject to exemptions the heads may grant. That is the opposite direction from the 2010 Act, which asked agencies to build telework in.

The open question is leadership and culture. Splitting a team between home and office raises questions that our guides on hybrid team leadership and culture in remote and hybrid teams address. The tools for the next phase are the subject of the history of AI productivity tools.

What it teaches teams today: pick a rhythm, such as set anchor days, and write it down. The best-documented hybrid trial used two days a week at home, and it was a schedule, not an exception.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Remote Work History

• Datini's company archive holds about 143,000 letters between almost 300 towns and cities.
• The Telework Enhancement Act was signed on December 9, 2010 and requires each executive agency to set a telework policy.
• Ctrip's randomized experiment found a 13% performance increase from working at home, rising to 22% once staff could choose.
• BLS found that the share working at home on days worked rose from 22 to 42 percent between 2019 and 2020.
• A six-month trial of 1,612 employees found hybrid work cut quit rates by one-third.
• In 2025, 35 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked.

The Pattern Behind the History

We call this the Distance-Trust Pattern. It is our own synthesis of this timeline, not a published model.

1. Distance forces records. Datini's letters and the putting-out piece rate both replaced watching with writing and counting.
2. Technology arrives before trust. Nilles's case and IBM's terminals came in the 1970s, and the mainstream followed decades later.
3. Evidence changes minds slowly. Ctrip proved the gain in 2013, and Yahoo recalled its workers the same year.
4. A shock moves the line. The 1973 oil crisis opened the debate, and the 2020 pandemic made it practice.
5. The settlement is a schedule. Hybrid, tested in a randomized trial, is a rhythm rather than a ruling on where work belongs.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Write things down. Every era of distance work leaned on records and measured results.
• Name your reason. Commute, hiring reach, space or focus will lead to different rules.
• Treat location as testable. Ctrip and Trip.com measured it, so you can too.
• Make hybrid a schedule. Set anchor days beat case-by-case permission.
• Expect reversals. Yahoo in 2013, IBM in 2017 and the US government in 2025 recalled workers. Plan for policy to swing.
• Place this in context. The long arc is in our history of productivity, and the shift from the factory day is in the history of the 8-hour workday.

Remote work has swung between trust and control for as long as there have been owners and workers at a distance. The teams that do it well settle on a written rhythm and measure what comes out.