Opinion: America needs to get smarter on remote work

America needs a smarter work from home policy, and Britain’s House of Lords has offered the right starting point: stop treating remote work as either a perk to protect or a problem to eliminate. The real question is what arrangement helps public servants do their work well, serve the public effectively, and stay in jobs that government increasingly struggles to fill. 

The report’s strongest lesson is its refusal to embrace a universal rule. Home-based and hybrid work can improve recruitment, retention, disability inclusion, caregiving support, and regional opportunity. It can also weaken mentoring, collaboration, onboarding, and workplace culture when managers fail to design it carefully. That balanced view of benefits and drawbacks is precisely what U.S. federal and state governments need now.

Washington has moved toward broad return-to-office requirements. President Trump’s 2025 memorandum on the topic directed federal agencies to end many remote-work arrangements and bring employees back to their duty stations full-time, with some exceptions. Several states have followed the same path. Ohio, for instance, ordered many state employees back to offices through an executive order on state employees. California set a default expectation of four in-office days per week for many state workers through its return to office order. 

Some in-person work is essential. Government needs secure collaboration, public-facing services, emergency response, mentoring, and institutional culture. But government office mandates should not pretend that physical presence automatically equals accountability. The better standard is performance: case backlogs, response times, service quality, staff retention, recruitment speed, employee engagement, office utilization, and citizen satisfaction.

The U.K. report also makes clear that remote work is not just a convenience issue, but a labor-force issue. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper on disability employment found that increased working from home explained a substantial share of the post-pandemic rise in full-time employment among people with physical disabilities. That should matter to every governor and agency head trying to fill public-sector vacancies. Remote and hybrid options can help government compete for talent, retain experienced workers, and expand access for people who face commuting, health, caregiving or geographic barriers. 

The U.S. should not simply copy Britain’s approach, of course — it should improve on it. Federal agencies and state governments should classify roles by function: site-required, hybrid-eligible, or remote-eligible. They should require managers to justify why location matters for specific tasks, not rely on blanket assumptions. They should train supervisors to manage hybrid teams, onboard new hires, coordinate anchor days, protect boundaries, and measure outcomes. A serious state telework policy should be transparent, auditable and tied to public-service results. 

The U.S. also needs better remote work data. Agencies should track what hybrid work does to productivity, equity, disability accommodations, real estate costs, cybersecurity, turnover and service delivery. States must also address complications Britain does not face in the same way, especially interstate taxation, payroll, workers’ compensation, and licensing. The National Conference of State Legislatures has warned that remote work can create complex state and local tax issues when employees work across borders.

The lesson from Britain is not that everyone should work from home. It is that serious governments should stop governing by slogan. The next stage of remote work reform should be evidence-based, role-specific and focused on public value. Presence matters when the work demands it. Flexibility matters when it improves hiring, retention, inclusion and performance. The governments that learn to tell the difference will serve citizens better than those that confuse office attendance with productivity. 

Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and wrote “The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results” and “ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators.”    

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