After years of slowly easing toward remote work arrangements, companies and their employees had to take the plunge fully clothed in March. Instead of drowning, they learned to make it work, saving an untold number of jobs and ushering in profound changes that will carry into a post-pandemic world.

“Remote work has been all or nothing in the past,” said Sara Sutton, founder and CEO of FlexJobs. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”

FlexJobs connects workers with remote work opportunities, and the Boulder-based company, practicing what it preaches, has operated remotely for 14 years. Despite being well-versed in what many companies were pushed into unwillingly, Sutton said this year has proved to be the hardest in the company’s history.

What happened this year doesn’t at all reflect the benefits that remote work can offer, Sutton said. And yet, despite all the limitations, many employees came to prefer it.

“It has been far more challenging than what typical remote work is by far,” she said. And yet, surveys show a majority of employees have developed a preference for remote work. They consider the trade-offs worth skipping lengthy commutes, dressing the part, dealing with office politics and noisy workspaces with constant interruptions.

While many jobs will always require showing up on site, managers realized far more jobs could be done remotely than they ever thought possible, that employees could be trusted to get the work done and that getting by with less real estate could provide significant savings going forward.

Now imagine remote work minus the worries of shepherding children through online classes or sparring with spouses who step into the background during a Zoom meeting, Sutton said. Imagine meeting coworkers for happy hours or lunches with no restrictions, reducing the social isolation that has made working remotely tough for many people. And imagine a world where jobs are untethered from geography, one where workers are freer to choose where they live and where employers can hire from anywhere.

That is what remote work could come to represent in the years ahead, Sutton predicts.

Eisner Amper, an accounting and consulting firm, surveyed business executives and found six in 10 plan to let their employees continue to work remotely after the pandemic ends, with a third still undecided and only 8% saying they will require everyone to return to the office.

Staffing agency Robert Half, in a survey released last month, found that nearly half of Denver-area employers had expanded their talent search geographically to reach more candidates and that 43% had started advertising fully remote jobs since the start of the pandemic, accelerating the move toward what consultants call the “anywhere workforce.”

Given the chance to work remotely on a more permanent basis, about 45% of workers said they would relocate from where they live now, with a fifth of those who moved in the past year saying the ability to work remotely was a key factor, according to another survey from Homes.com.

What all those surveys suggest is that remote work, whether in a pure or hybrid form, will remain much more prevalent than it was before the pandemic in what could prove one of the biggest changes left behind by the pandemic.

“An evolution that was supposed to take decades happened in a few short weeks,” said Matthew Leger, a research analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, which recently hosted a webinar on the future of remote work. “It may be years before we understand how this shift has impacted workers, employers and the broader society.”

Employers are thinking about how they move forward with their business operations, and remote work is part of the calculation, said Lorrie Ray, director of member engagement at the Employers Council in Denver.

Workspaces can be smaller and adjusted to better handle collaboration between employees who will be based primarily at home. Some workplaces may gravitate toward a hotel model, where workers check-in for a few days a week rather than maintain a dedicated space.

“The surveys that I have seen indicate that a majority of employees want a blend, about 70% want a blend,” Ray said. “Everybody likes human contact, but the amount of contact they like varies. Employees also like the idea of being able to control their work environment.”

Arthur Nowak, senior vice president of Asia Pacific Operations for TTEC, said before the pandemic, about 10% of the employees at the Douglas County company, which provides customer support services globally, were set up to work from home. That shot up to 75% during the pandemic.

“We had that infrastructure in place, and we were able to flip around so quickly,” Nowak said. “There was comfort in that work (from home) arrangement.”

While he doesn’t envision 75% of workers remaining remote, he could see a 50-50 split in the U.S., depending on what clients are requesting and what individual employees want.

Rather than viewing remote work as an either-or proposition, the company now views it along a spectrum, he said. Some workers will prefer to remain entirely at home, while others will crave the daily camaraderie of a shared workspace, he said. Most, however, will probably favor the ability to switch between the two.

“We are embracing this new work-at-home future. There will be a greater and larger footprint of work at home available for our employees,” he said.

To that end, the company, which has 1,501 workers in Colorado and 55,000 globally, has honed virtual reality tools that allow workers to interact with each other and train in what Nowak likens to “Sim City.”

Shannon Armbrecht, head of People Development and Strategy at Western Union, said before the pandemic, just under 20% of the company’s workers had the ability to work remotely, which was on the high end. Of its 11,000 workers spread across the globe, about 2,000 work in the Denver area.

As was the case at TTEC, workers were considered either office-based or remote. When the company reopened the doors to its Denver headquarters, a few select departments, like the foreign currency trading desk, missed the in-person collaboration and came back.

But occupancy never got above 10%, which was far less than expected. About nine in 10 employees said they were equally or more productive at home, a view their managers backed up.

“We never had to manage to that 25% that was allowed,” Armbrecht said. The focus shifted beyond finding the best way to bring employees safely back to the office to embracing work in a flexible environment.

The company added a $30-a-month benefit to help cover Internet costs and paid a one-time COVID-19 bonus for those outside senior management. Western Union provided employees with monitors, desks, chairs and other equipment for home offices.

“Communication was a big lesson for us. It was better to be out there and having the conversation and letting employees talk about their needs,” Armbrecht said.

Realizing the lack of child care was a major concern, Western Union covered the cost of up to 20 days of in-home child care so parents could better focus on their jobs. It created an online COVID-19 resource center to help employees deal with the challenges of working remotely, ranging from how to handle Zoom meetings to creating boundaries between work and personal time. It also beefed up mental health resources to help employees deal with feelings of isolation, anxiety and burnout.

“We have not made our decisions completely,” Armbrecht said of the company’s future direction. But Western Union will likely go with a hybrid model.

Early research is showing that a hybrid model, one that combines the best of traditional and remote work arrangements, is the one that will prove most productive, said Christos Makridis, a research professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, during the AEI call.

“Organizations will have to figure out that sweet spot, and it will depend on the values of that organization,” he said.

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