This article has been adapted from a LinkedIn article originally published by Tad Ostrowski, Founder and CEO of Artington Legal.

An recent article in The Sunday Times argued that working from home was vital during Covid, but that “the emergency’s over”.

I agree with the second part. The emergency is over.

But I think that misses the point about remote working.

Working from home in 2026 is not simply an emergency arrangement left over from the pandemic. There are businesses that were designed around remote working long before Covid arrived, and others that have deliberately chosen to build that way since.

GitLab operates as an all-remote company. Automattic, the business behind WordPress, has a remote-first culture and a globally distributed workforce. Their website states that “Everyone works from the location they choose, during the hours they choose“. Zapier has been remote since 2011.

These organisations are not waiting for somebody to tell them it is safe to return to the office.

Remote working is their operating model.

Remote does not mean alone

There is also something not quite right (in my humble opinion) about the way remote work is sometimes characterised.

It can conjure up an image of somebody sitting at the kitchen table, perhaps in their pyjamas, completing individual tasks in splendid isolation.

That isn’t how a well-run remote business works, although different companies have different dress codes.

My working day can involve conversations with colleagues, clients and advisers; reviewing documents together; exchanging ideas; mentoring; solving problems; challenging somebody else’s thinking; and collaborating on transactions. (I don’t work in my pyjamas.)

Those interactions do not cease to be collaborative simply because the people involved aren’t sitting within twenty feet of one another.

The distinction is not really between working together and working alone.

It is between co-located and distributed working.

And those are not the same thing.

Do we really need to be in the same room to learn?

One of the arguments frequently made for office working is that people learn from those around them.

There is obviously something in that. Informal conversations matter. It can be useful to overhear how an experienced colleague handles a difficult issue. Face-to-face interaction can be valuable.

But physical proximity is not the same thing as learning.

A lawyer does not automatically develop because someone more experienced happens to occupy a desk nearby.

They develop because senior colleagues make themselves accessible, questions are encouraged in a safe environment, feedback is given to assist learning and development, experience is shared collaboratively and mentoring is taken seriously.

I am not saying that there is proof that remote working is always and in all cases better than office working.

But I am saying that experience, knowledge-sharing and the benefits of working with senior colleagues can operate very effectively in an entirely remote organisation.

Collaboration can be designed

There is another assumption worth thinking about: that collaboration simply happens because people occupy the same building.

Sometimes it does.

And sometimes people spend eight hours in the same office communicating mainly through email and Teams.

Putting people together creates opportunities for interaction. It doesn’t guarantee useful and effective interaction.

Remote organisations have to be more deliberate.

They need good technology. They need channels where people can ask questions openly. They need regular conversations between managers and their teams. They need structured mentoring. They need to document knowledge rather than allowing it to reside in the head of whoever happens to sit nearest to the printer.

That intentionality can have advantages.

A conversation at the coffee machine disappears once it is over.

A well-documented piece of guidance can be searched, shared and used by somebody joining the organisation six months later.

Neither approach is inherently superior. They are simply different ways of organising knowledge and collaboration.

The productivity evidence is more nuanced than the debate

The evidence on productivity does not support a simple conclusion that either the office or home is inherently better.

I have written previously about the evidence on wellbeing, commuting time and productivity, so I won’t repeat that argument here.

Remote working is not a productivity shortcut, but neither is physical presence in an office a guarantee of productivity. What matters is whether the work is suitable for remote delivery and whether the organisation has been designed to support it properly.

That brings us back to the distinction at the heart of this article. Sending an office workforce home in an emergency is very different from deliberately building a business around remote working.

And wellbeing is part of the design

The same distinction matters when we talk about wellbeing.

Remote working can bring genuine benefits: greater control over the working day, less time and energy spent commuting and more scope to fit work alongside exercise, family and other parts of life. But it can also create isolation, blurred boundaries and an unhealthy tendency for work to spill into everything else.

The answer is not to pretend those risks do not exist. It is to design for them. A remote-first organisation needs to create connection deliberately, maintain sensible boundaries, make managers and senior colleagues accessible and ensure that flexibility does not become isolation.

For me, that is why wellbeing belongs in this discussion. It is not an incidental benefit of working from home. It is one of the things an organisation should consciously consider when deciding how work is structured and how people are supported to do it well.

Remote working isn’t right for everybody

None of this means everybody should work remotely.

Some people love the social side of being in an office. Some jobs require physical presence. Some people find working from home isolating. Some teams collaborate more effectively face to face. And some organisations are simply not very good at managing people remotely.

Those are all perfectly good reasons to maintain offices and office-based roles.

They are not particularly good reasons for concluding that everybody else needs to work that way too.

Perhaps one of the lessons from Covid was not simply that people could work from home.

Perhaps it demonstrated that we had taken one particular way of organising professional work, commuting to the same building at broadly the same time each day, often arriving stressed, and treated it as though it were the natural order of things.

It isn’t.

It is one model.

Remote-first working is another.

The real question is how well the organisation is designed

At Artington, we have worked remotely since the start, for years.

That does not mean we don’t collaborate.

Collaboration is one of our core values.

So are Excellence and Wellbeing.

For us, the challenge is not to choose one of those at the expense of another.

It is to build an organisation in which they reinforce each other.

That means trusting experienced people. Making senior colleagues accessible. Sharing knowledge deliberately. Investing in technology. Communicating properly. Meeting when there is a reason to meet. And measuring people by the quality of what they contribute rather than the amount of time somebody can physically observe them doing it.

Good organisations create connection deliberately.

Poor ones can leave people disconnected whether they are 100 miles apart or sitting at adjoining desks.

So yes, the emergency is over.

Remote working isn’t.

And perhaps it’s time we stopped judging it as an emergency response and started judging it for what, in some organisations, it actually is:

a deliberate way of building a business.

Are you interested in working differently? Find out more about joining Artington Legal.

References

Hannah Prevett, The Sunday Times (19 September 2026), “Yes, WFH was vital during Covid, but the emergency’s over.”

Company examples: GitLab, Automattic and Zapier, published materials on their remote-working models.