What 2025 taught us about remote work and building distributed teams

Remote work is here to stay. No surprises there.

But the biggest learning from 2025 is about the gains companies can still capture by getting better at it. With the right management practices and strategic thinking, moving to distributed teams unlocks significant advantages: lower costs, access to larger talent pools, and the ability to attract and retain top performers who value flexibility.

The companies that will succeed in 2026 will be the ones that move past debating where work happens and focus on how to make distributed teams work better for their bottom line.

In this article, Near (Hire With Near) analyzed remote work trends in 2025 to identify key lessons for building distributed teams.

Key Takeaways:

• Flexibility is now a core expectation for workers, and the companies that stop debating where work happens and start optimizing distributed work will outperform in 2026.
• Building distributed teams requires intentional management practices, including remote leadership training, clear boundaries, and facilitated social connection.
• Time zone alignment is emerging as a major advantage for distributed teams. Near's data shows a significant shift from traditional offshore markets to nearshore talent in Latin America, as companies seek real-time collaboration, better communication, and healthier, more sustainable remote work.

Lesson 1: Remote and hybrid work are the new baseline

Companies waiting for a "return to normal" missed that we're already there. This is normal, even as a minority of executives push for more office time.

Despite return-to-office (RTO) mandates by big names like Amazon, J.P. Morgan, and AT&T in 2025, according to Gallup, in Q2 2025, the share of remote-capable employees working hybrid ticked down only slightly from a high of 55% in 2024 to 51%. Only 21% of people having remote-capable roles remain exclusively on-site, and this has stayed pretty consistent since June 2021.

For some industries, the percentage of those working remotely is much higher. Stack Overflow's 2025 Developer Survey of 49,000 respondents found that 45% of U.S. developers work fully remote-the highest adoption rate globally-with only 16.2% having fully in-office roles.

Taken together, the 2025 data paints a clear picture: Remote and hybrid aren't a temporary detour from a five-day office default. They've become the baseline for how knowledge work is organized in the U.S. The question for 2026 isn't whether companies will "go back," but how intentionally they'll design around this new normal.

Lesson 2: Distributed teams need special management consideration

Remote work creates a management challenge that most organizations haven't addressed: Workers can be highly engaged yet simultaneously burning out.

Final thoughts: The real opportunity in 2026 is optimizing distributed work-not debating it

Stanford economist Professor Nick Bloom has been studying remote work for two decades. In a panel discussion at the 2024 Running Remote conference, he said he often hears people debating whether remote work increases or decreases productivity. However, the question should be how it affects a company's bottom line. "Firms should care about profitability, not productivity," he said, because productivity is hard to measure.

Fully remote teams have "an enormous upside." Companies don't have to pay for office space, and they can hire talent outside their local area. According to Bloom, "It's much easier to make the case that fully remote is extremely profitable, so I try and shift the case to that because ultimately [that is] what the business should care about anyway."

Bloom's advice is sound and makes it clear that the competitive advantage doesn't belong to the companies still arguing about where work should happen. It belongs to the organizations that have moved on. The ones focused on how distributed work can be designed to maximize both performance and profitability.

Managers who are trained for remote leadership can create teams that are both engaged and thriving. Time zone-aligned teams can collaborate more smoothly, maintain stronger social connections, and avoid the erosion of well-being that happens when people are stretched across odd hours. And companies that broaden their talent pools outside the U.S. don't just lower costs; they unlock capabilities and experience that were previously inaccessible.

A distributed team with members in New York, Austin, and Buenos Aires operates no differently than one spread across the U.S. only, but with access to a broader talent pool and lower salary expectations in nearshore markets.

Remote work isn't going anywhere. And the opportunity ahead isn't small. It's the chance to build organizations that are more flexible, more resilient, and more profitable than what was possible in a fully local, fully office-bound world. The companies that understand that now will be the ones setting the pace in the year ahead.

This story was produced by Near (Hire With Near) and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

Stacker National

This story was originally published December 3, 2025 at 6:00 AM.