The “Grow Remote – Future of Work Pulse” looks at what’s shaping the future of work across Ireland and beyond. We round up the latest stories, share insights, opinions and spotlight how distributed work is empowering people, employers and communities to thrive, while not shying away from the challenges of remote!
1) Remote Work is a Lifeline for Disabled Workers – But Only If Leaders Choose to Make It So
New research from Lancaster University makes a compelling case: for disabled workers, remote and hybrid working is not a perk. It’s a performance enabler. And whether employees get to access it depends almost entirely on leadership.
The Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study surveyed 1,221 disabled workers across the UK and conducted 45 in-depth interviews. The findings are significant. Most disabled workers reported that remote or hybrid working had positively impacted their mental and physical health, their work-life balance, productivity, and their ability to manage their health conditions. Crucially, the data shows a clear dose-response relationship: the more remote, the better the outcomes. 64% of fully remote disabled workers said their work pattern had positively affected their physical health, compared to just 31% of those working remotely less than half the time.
The research also explored experiences of requesting workplace adjustments, accessing equipment and support, and the role of digital tools in enabling inclusive work. Unmet needs remain significant, but the direction is clear: flexibility is foundational to this cohort’s ability to perform, progress and stay in work.
For Irish employers, there is also a legislative dimension worth noting. The Department of Children, Disability and Equality is the lead Department for the right to request a remote working arrangement that was integrated into the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023, enacted on 4 April 2023 which also provides the right to request flexible working arrangements for parents and carers. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment is then responsible for the provisions within the Act in relation to the right to request remote working arrangements.
Grow Remote Opinion:
This research matters. For disabled workers – who represent a significant share of every workforce, remote and hybrid working can be the difference between staying in employment or leaving it entirely. Between thriving and burning out. Between contributing fully and masking just to get through the day.
Workplace adjustments are still too often treated as a burden to be managed rather than an investment to be made. Many disabled workers still face friction, scepticism and inconsistency when requesting the flexibility they need.
The organisations that get this right in the future of work have leaders who understand that designing for the needs of disabled employees doesn’t create a two-tier workforce. It creates a better one. Inclusive design, done well, raises the floor for everyone.
Ireland’s Work Life Balance Act creates the framework only. The leaders who will build the most competitive and resilient organisations are those who go well beyond the minimum, not because they have to, but because they understand the talent, diversity and performance they unlock when they do.
Sources: Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study, Lancaster University | Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023
2) Your CEO’s Age Tells You More About Your Remote Policy Than Your Employee Handbook Does
A new working paper from Stanford, Harvard and the NBER has put some numbers behind the idea that the single biggest predictor of how much flexibility employees get isn’t industry, company size or even location. It’s who’s in charge.
Researchers at Stanford, ITAM, the ifo Institute and Princeton analysed data from over 76,000 US workers across two years.
Employees at firms founded after 2015 work from home almost twice as often as those at firms founded before 1990. Employees under CEOs aged under 30 average 1.4 WFH days per week. Under a CEO aged 60 or over, that drops to 1.1 days. The relationship is monotonic, every decade of CEO age correlates with a step down in remote working rates. And when the researchers controlled for firm age, the CEO age effect diminished, suggesting that it’s the organisation’s culture (shaped by its founders and leadership0 that drives the pattern, rather than individual management style alone.
As of December 2025, full WFH days account for 27% of paid workdays in the United States. That figure has been stable since 2023, suggesting the market has found its current equilibrium. But this research suggests that equilibrium is not uniformly distributed, it’s shaped, firm by firm, and in many cases by the people at the top.
Grow Remote Opinion:
This research should prompt a direct question for every business leader in Ireland: Is our remote work policy based on what works for people profit and planet, or on what we’re comfortable with?
The evidence here points to something many of us have observed on the ground but rarely see quantified like this. Remote and hybrid work policies are not primarily outputs of strategy or HR process. They are outputs of leadership culture. A younger founder who built their company during the pandemic, with Notion and Slack and Zoom baked into the operating model from day one, makes different decisions and strategies almost organically vs a CEO who built their leadership identity in an era where physical presence was the primary signal of commitment.
Neither is wrong by default. Remote is not for everyone or every company. But the data is clear that the organisations limiting flexibility based on leadership preference rather than operational needs are paying a price though talent, in retention, and revenue growth.
For Irish employers navigating this, the insight is practical. If your remote or hybrid policy is based primarily on the instincts of senior leadership rather than evidence about what supports your people and your output, it’s worth asking why. Culture is shaped from the top. But the best leaders know when to let data challenge their defaults.
This is precisely why leadership capability is at the heart of what we do at Grow Remote. Our Lead From Anywhere programme is designed to equip Irish managers and leaders with the skills, frameworks and confidence to lead distributed teams well – not because hybrid is the fashionable choice, but because it is increasingly the competitive one.
Sources: Younger Firms and CEOs Allow More Work from Home, NBER Working Paper No. 34795
3) Nick Bloom on The Ripple Effect of Remote & What Leaders Still Get Wrong
Stanford economist Nick Bloom, a global workplace expert and researcher on remote and hybrid work recently joined the SIEPR podcast to discuss how flexible work is reshaping not just the office, but the labour market, housing, leisure and the economy. The conversation is good listening for anyone curious about the ripple effect of remote work.
In the US, remote work has stabilised at around 25% of workdays, with hybrid arrangements now the dominant model for most Fortune 500 companies. About half of Americans work from home roughly half the time. CSO Data in Ireland paints a similar picture.
While productivity is still one of the most contested questions in the remote work debate circles, Bloom cites a large-scale randomised control trial published in Nature in 2024, run with Trip.com and its 40,000 employees. They found no productivity difference between employees coming in three days a week versus five, across marketing, accounting, finance and engineering. What hybrid did change, dramatically, was quit rates. They were down by a third in the hybrid group. When Trip.com ran the numbers, they calculated that rolling out hybrid across the full firm would increase profits by approximately $50 million a year through reduced turnover costs alone. As Bloom puts it: “If you like work from home, capitalism is your friend.”!
The latest Dublin Chambers report suggests the same is valid here in Ireland re productivity.
Bloom also raises a point that firms calling for full return to office are often using it as a tool for headcount reduction, not operational improvement. That’s a strategy with serious risks. The people most likely to leave when forced back full-time are precisely the people you most want to keep – as covered by RTE.
The podcast also touches on what Bloom calls the “ripple effect” – remote work’s broader social and economic impacts. The shift in leisure patterns, the growth in suburban housing demand, the changing role of city centres. These aren’t peripheral observations. They reflect the scale of transformation that flexible work has triggered and the degree to which it is now structurally embedded in how people live and work.
The leisure economy has been transformed. Using GPS data tracking journeys to golf courses, Bloom’s team found a significant surge in weekday golf post-pandemic. Wednesday afternoons, once quiet on the fairways, are now busy. The same pattern shows up in yoga studios, hair salons and pickleball courts – anything that used to be crushed into evenings and weekends has spread across the working week. The leisure economy hasn’t shrunk. It has redistributed. And that redistribution is a direct consequence of millions of people gaining flexibility over their time.
Housing markets have been fundamentally repriced. Bloom coined the term “the donut effect” to describe what has happened to urban geography since 2020. When you only need to commute two or three days a week instead of five, your calculus about where to live changes significantly. En masse, people have moved outward to suburbs with more space, gardens, and quieter streets.
Data from the last WDC Remote Work in Ireland Survey defines that this is already happening in Ireland.
City centres are recovering but differently than before. Rather than being sustained by worker footfall five days a week, city centres are increasingly driven by leisure and consumption. Workers who spend Monday and Friday at home are more likely to head into the city for dinner on a Wednesday evening. Research presented at Stanford’s own remote work conference showed that the best-performing urban areas are the ones with strong amenities (restaurants, culture, nightlife) rather than simply the ones with the most office space. The implication for city planning, retail and hospitality is significant.
Even crime has been affected. Bloom notes, with some wryness, that burglars have figured out that suburban homes are now occupied during the day. Residential burglaries in suburban areas have declined. Meanwhile, city centre crime (already a challenge) became more visible during the pandemic as the natural surveillance of busy streets disappeared.
Grow Remote Opinion:
There is a clear link between the global data and what we hear from employers in Ireland every week. The productivity debate has largely been settled. The retention case for hybrid is robust. The remaining challenges are not about whether flexible work works, they are about whether leaders have the capability to make it work well.
What makes this podcast worth sharing with your leadership team is not the headline productivity numbers. It is the breadth of what remote and hybrid work has actually changed.
The ripple effect is real and it is wide. The leisure economy, the housing market, urban geography, commuting patterns, suburban crime are not peripheral side effects. They are evidence of a structural shift in how people organise their lives. And that shift was not driven by policy. It was driven by millions of individual decisions made by people who, given the choice, elected to use their time and energy differently.
For Irish employers and HR leaders, the question this raises is not just “how many days should we mandate in the office?” It is “do we understand what our people’s working lives actually look like, and are we making decisions based on both that reality and the business needs.
The organisations that will lead in the next decade are not necessarily the ones that get the number of office days exactly right. They are the ones that understand why those choices matter, who they affect, and how to build the management capability to make distributed work genuinely productive rather than just compliant.
In terms of the ripple effect of remote work in Ireland – we looked at what would happen if “Six Remote Roles Open at Buffer in Feb ’26” landed Ireland here.
Sources: Myths and truths: How remote work is redefining our lives, Dublin Chambers, Grow Remote Blog, RTE
About Grow Remote
Our mission is to solve the challenges of remote work in order to unlock social, economic and environmental change for individuals, employers and local communities.
One of the ways we deliver this is through fully funded training courses for leaders and aspiring managers in Ireland – Lead From Anywhere and the next group starts March 25th with a deadline to register your interest here by March 18th.
Featured Image Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
