Remote Work vs Office in 2026: Our Experience at Intelvision

Remote work vs office: what changed since 2021

Working at the office was the norm for most companies before the pandemic. A few worked largely remotely, but home office was usually an occasional perk. When Covid-19 forced everybody to stay home, companies, including Intelvision, adapted quickly, and many discovered that software teams could deliver without sharing a building.

The question in 2021 was whether remote work would last or whether there would be a large-scale return to the office. The answer turned out to be neither. Hybrid became the default for jobs that can be done remotely:

• Among US employees with remote-capable jobs, Gallup found in May 2026 that 52% work hybrid, 26% exclusively remotely and 22% on-site. Asked in November 2025 what they would prefer, 61% chose hybrid, 33% fully remote and only 6% on-site.
• Software developers are even more remote. In the Stack Overflow 2026 Developer Survey (24,602 responses to the question), 34.8% work remotely, 35.4% hybrid, 12.2% choose freely and 17.6% work in person. The split varies by country: 48% of US respondents are remote, against 21% in France.
• Some large employers went the other way. Amazon told its corporate employees to be in the office five days a week from January 2, 2025, citing culture, collaboration and learning from one another.

So the real question in 2026 is not remote or office. It is which work needs people together, how often, and how to make the rest work well at a distance. The sections below cover the evidence and the trade-offs of each option.

What the research says now

In 2021 most of the evidence came from surveys about how people felt. Since then, two pieces of research have given clearer answers, and they point in slightly different directions.

Hybrid work improves retention

Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang ran a randomized controlled trial with 1,612 graduate engineering, marketing and finance employees at a large technology firm, Trip.com. Hybrid work, a mix of home and office days each week, cut attrition by 33% and improved job satisfaction. Managers and non-managers saw it differently: non-managers predicted a positive impact on productivity, while managers predicted a negative one and were less likely to work from home on eligible days.

Sitting together helps juniors learn

Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais studied software engineers at a Fortune 500 company from 2019 to 2024, using office closures and later return-to-office mandates as natural experiments. Sitting near teammates increased coding feedback by 18.3% and improved code quality. The gains were concentrated among less-tenured and younger engineers. The trade-off: experienced engineers wrote less code when they sat near their teammates.

Put together, the research suggests a trade-off rather than a winner: flexibility keeps people, and proximity speeds up learning for juniors. The practical response is to design for both, not to pick one and ignore the other.

Pros of working remotely

These positive aspects are commonly associated with remote work, and most of them have held up since 2021:

• Personal control over the workspace. Many people have argued over the thermostat or how cold the air conditioning should be. At home, those settings are up to the worker. The same goes for noise from colleagues or sharing a desk area with messier coworkers. Without these distractions, people can focus more fully on their tasks.
• Larger talent pools. Remove geographical constraints and recruitment has a much larger pool to draw from. As long as developers have a stable internet connection and good hardware, they can log in and start work from anywhere. With a few hours of overlap, time zones are rarely a blocker. For IT this matters a lot, because senior engineers with specific skills are scarce in every single city.
• Less commuting and more control over the day. People do not lose time in morning traffic or packed trains, and they can fit appointments and family around work. For many, that reduces stress noticeably.
• Employee retention. This is now the best-documented benefit. The Trip.com trial found 33% lower attrition with hybrid work, and Gallup’s data shows that only 6% of remote-capable US employees would choose to be fully on-site. Offering flexibility helps keep the best people.

Cons of working remotely

Naturally, nothing is perfect, and working from home brings its own problems:

• Hardware investment. If people work fully or partly from home, they need laptops, monitors and phones so that they stay productive and reachable. When the lockdown started, all Intelvision team members got the equipment they needed to work from home. Home internet connections are also more prone to failure, which makes meetings and system access harder. Businesses that had remote options before the pandemic had a much easier transition.
• Software and security. IT has to provide secure access to company and client systems, manage devices remotely, and make sure everyone is fluent in the communication tools, so that information does not get lost between channels.
• Distraction. Some people work less effectively outside the office, where there are fewer checks and less social pressure. Depending on someone’s living situation, a small apartment with roommates or children, working from home can be close to impossible.
• Loss of office contact. Remote teams have fewer casual interactions, which can lead to shallower relationships and a looser culture. The small movements of office life, to meeting rooms, kitchens and colleagues’ desks, and the conversations that happen on the way, disappear at home. That is why we introduced weekly online team meetings after the outbreak of Covid-19, and kept activities like English courses and online game evenings that helped us stay a close-knit group.
• Slower learning for juniors. This is the con that 2021 discussions underrated. The Fortune 500 study above shows that new and younger engineers lose the most when feedback has to be requested in writing instead of happening at the next desk. Remote teams have to replace that feedback deliberately.

Benefits of working in the office

Traditional offices also have their advantages:

• A clear line between work and private life. Commuting is rarely fun, but it gives people time to prepare for work and later to leave it behind. Some people need that structure. Even remote workers sometimes go to a coffee shop or a coworking space to create the same boundary.
• Face-to-face contact. As good as video calls are, people interact better with someone in the same room. Eye contact, facial expressions and body language are easier to read, and difficult conversations are easier in person.
• Training and help. When developers share a space, the barrier to asking for help is much lower. Personal contact also narrows the distance between new hires and seniors, who meet over lunch and in breaks. The 18.3% increase in coding feedback measured among co-located engineers is this effect in numbers.
• Team spirit. Working as a team matters not only for productivity, but also for making each person feel comfortable and appreciated. Shared space makes it easy to organize team-building and to bond.
• A comfortable working environment. Most offices have ergonomic chairs and desks, good lighting and reliable connectivity, which many home setups lack.

Cons of working in the office

Offices also come with clear drawbacks:

• Commuting. Getting to the office means waking up earlier and spending time on buses, trains or roads, especially at rush hour, and the same again on the way home.
• Less flexibility. Office schedules usually run from 8 or 9 am to 5 or 6 pm. If you need to handle something personal during the day, it is hard to fit around fixed hours.
• Recruitment and retention problems. Employees value the option to work from home: in Gallup’s data, only 6% of remote-capable US employees prefer to work fully on-site. Strict office rules discourage candidates and push experienced people toward employers who offer flexibility, which is exactly what the retention research above measured.
• A smaller talent pool. If everyone must live within commuting distance, you can only hire the engineers who live there.

Remote, hybrid or office: a side-by-side comparison

How to decide which model fits your team

There is no universal answer. These questions usually settle it:

1. Where is the talent you need? If the skills you need are scarce locally, remote or hybrid across a region is the only realistic option.
2. How senior is the team? A team of experienced engineers works well remotely. A team with many juniors needs regular time together, or a deliberate remote mentoring setup.
3. How much of the work is collaborative discovery? Early product work, workshops and architecture decisions benefit from being in a room. Implementation against a clear backlog does not.
4. Do your processes exist in writing? If decisions, priorities and onboarding live only in people’s heads, remote work will expose it quickly.
5. What do your clients need? Teams that work inside a client’s organization often have to fit the client’s tools and rhythm, wherever they sit.

What makes remote engineering work: the practices we rely on

Remote teams succeed or fail on process, not on location. These practices make the difference:

• One source of truth. Tasks, decisions and priorities live in one system, usually Jira or a similar tool, not scattered across chat, email and spreadsheets.
• Small, focused standups. A daily standup is for the people working on the same product, not for the whole company.
• Written decisions. Architecture and product decisions are recorded with their reasons, so people who were not in the meeting can follow them.
• Protected overlap hours. Agree a few hours each day when everyone is reachable, and leave the rest for focused work.
• Deliberate feedback for juniors. Pair programming, fast code reviews and a named mentor replace the questions that would otherwise happen across the desk.
• Handover before absences. No piece of work should depend on one person who is on holiday.
• Real onboarding. Access on day one, a buddy, documentation and a first task that ships within the first two weeks.

We have seen what happens without these basics. In one engineering diagnostic for a German consultancy, daily standups ran with 16 people, entire Monday mornings went to meetings, feedback was split across four tools, and one part-time contributor lost 30% of her limited weekly hours to unstructured meetings. None of these problems is specific to remote work. They come from missing structure, and distance makes missing structure more expensive. For more on the communication side, see our article on remote team communication strategies.

How we work at Intelvision in 2026

In 2021 we wrote that we would stay flexible and tolerate telework when needed, while encouraging people to come back to the office. Our practice moved further toward remote work than that conclusion suggested.

Today our engineers join client teams and stay with them, working inside each client’s tools, standups and release process, with direct access to the people making product decisions. Client work in our published case studies spans Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Croatia and the United States, delivered by distributed teams. For that kind of work, the client’s Jira, repositories and meetings matter far more than our own office. When we add engineers to a client team through our engineering talent service, they join remotely and work to the client’s rhythm.

What we kept from 2021 is the attention to team life. According to our careers page, the working environment is remote, with flexible working hours and a complete hardware package: a fast computer, several large monitors and test devices. We run weekly corporate English lessons, game evenings and seasonal corporate events, offer regular well-being meetings with professionals such as a psychologist, and provide a budget for health treatment.

The result we watch most closely is whether people stay. Our team retention is 89%, and 95% of our developers stay with their clients for 12 months or more. Remote work alone does not produce those numbers. Matching people carefully to a team, and keeping them with one engagement instead of rotating them, matters more.

A remote and hybrid work policy checklist for engineering teams

Whatever model you choose, write it down. A short policy prevents most of the arguments that start when expectations differ between managers. It should answer these questions:

• Where and when: which days, if any, are shared in-person days, and what they are used for.
• Core hours: the hours when everyone is reachable, and the time zones the team covers.
• Response times: what counts as urgent, which channel to use for it, and how fast people are expected to reply to chat, email and code reviews.
• Meetings: which recurring meetings exist, who attends each, and the rule that decisions are written down afterwards.
• Equipment and costs: what the company provides, what it reimburses, and who owns the equipment.
• Security: device management, VPN or zero-trust access, and rules for working in client systems from home or in public places.
• Mentoring: who mentors each junior engineer, how often they pair, and the target time for code review.
• Absences: how work is handed over before holidays and sick leave, so nothing depends on one person.
• Team time: how often the team meets for planning, retrospectives and social time, in person or online.
• Review: when the policy will be checked against retention, delivery and team feedback, and changed if it is not working.

Review the policy with the team after the first three months. The point is not to settle remote against office once and for all, but to make the arrangement explicit enough that people can plan their lives and their work around it.

Common mistakes when going remote or returning to the office

• Copying the office calendar online. Moving every meeting to video produces the same number of meetings with worse attention.
• Measuring presence instead of outcomes. Online status and hours logged say little about delivery. Track cycle time, quality and goals met.
• Forgetting juniors. Without a mentor and fast reviews, new engineers learn slowly and leave sooner.
• Mandating office days without a purpose. If people commute to sit on video calls all day, the office day costs more than it gives. Use shared days for workshops, pairing and planning.
• Ignoring security. Personal devices and home networks need the same care as office equipment, especially when engineers work in client systems.
• Letting the culture run itself. Distance weakens relationships unless someone invests in them deliberately. Our article on remote team building activities has practical ideas.

Conclusion

Every person is different, and not all of the pros and cons in this article will apply to everyone. There is still no single ideal workspace, whether an office, home, hybrid arrangement or flexible coworking space.

What has changed since 2021 is the evidence. Flexibility measurably keeps people, and being together measurably helps junior engineers learn. A good setup in 2026 uses both: remote work by default for focused delivery, deliberate time together or structured remote mentoring for learning and discovery, and written processes that make either mode work. For distributed teams that are set up this way, location stops being the main question. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, read about the advantages of distributed development teams.