Cast your mind back to March 2020. One day you were commuting, sitting at your desk, grabbing a coffee with colleagues. The next, the government told you to go home — and stay there.
For millions of people, that was the beginning of one of the biggest shifts in working life in living memory. And five years on, the world of work has never fully gone back to what it was.
From the Exception to the Rule — Almost Overnight
Before the pandemic, working from home was the exception, not the norm. In fact, in January 2020 — just weeks before the first lockdown — only 5.7% of UK workers were based at home full-time. Most people went into the office an average of 3.8 days a week. It was just how things were done.
Then March happened.
By April 2020, 43% of the UK workforce was working from home, almost entirely because of Covid-19. In London, that figure hit 57%. Overnight, kitchen tables became desks, spare bedrooms became offices, and video calls became the default way of having a meeting.
Nobody planned for it. Nobody trained for it. We just had to get on with it.
It Wasn’t All Bad — But It Wasn’t All Good Either
Here’s the honest truth: the experience of working from home during lockdown was genuinely mixed, and it depended enormously on your circumstances.
For some people — particularly those in larger homes, without young children, and doing knowledge-based jobs — it turned out to be surprisingly workable. Fewer commutes meant more time. More focus meant more output. A good chunk of people discovered they were actually more productive at home.
Research backed this up. Studies found that those who felt they produced more per hour when working from home were strongly motivated to keep doing so. That productivity shift became a powerful argument for flexible working that employers couldn’t easily ignore.
But for others, lockdown working was genuinely difficult. Research from the Institute for Employment Studies found that within the first two weeks of lockdown, over half of home workers reported new aches and pains — particularly in the neck and shoulders — largely because people were hunched over laptops on sofas and kitchen chairs rather than proper workstations.
And then there was the mental health side. Being stuck at home while also trying to work — with no separation between your “work space” and your “living space” — took a toll. Studies found that loneliness was a significant factor in increased anxiety and depression, particularly during the periods when restrictions were tightened again in late 2020 and early 2021. It wasn’t home working itself causing the harm — it was the combination of home working and isolation and fear.
That’s an important distinction. The difficulty wasn’t simply working from home. It was doing so during a crisis, with nowhere to go, no social outlet, and no end in sight.
What Lockdown Proved — And What It Changed Forever
Lockdown was a stress test that nobody asked for. But it produced some clear results.
The biggest one? That a huge swathe of office-based jobs can be done remotely — at least in part. Before the pandemic, many employers believed remote working would undermine productivity, team cohesion, and company culture. Some of those concerns were valid. But the reality of millions of people keeping the economy running from their spare rooms proved that the old assumption — “you need to be in the office to do your job properly” — wasn’t quite as solid as it seemed.
Once that genie was out of the bottle, it was never going back in.
Where We Are Now
Fast forward to 2025 and the landscape of UK working life looks permanently different.
Around 42% of UK workers now do at least some of their job from home — split between 28% in hybrid arrangements and 14% fully remote. That compares to just 10% before the pandemic. Hybrid working — the idea that you split your week between home and the office — has gone from a niche perk to the expected standard for a huge portion of the workforce.
And crucially, over 58% of UK businesses have restructured or reduced their office space since the pandemic, while more than 70% plan to redesign their workplaces to better suit hybrid working models. Companies have physically adapted their buildings to reflect the new reality — hot desking, collaboration spaces, fewer permanent desks.
The commuter economy has felt this too. City centre coffee shops, sandwich bars, and dry cleaners all took a hit as footfall dropped. Some have recovered. Others haven’t. The ripple effects of that initial lockdown are still playing out in high streets across the country.
The Tug of War: Return-to-Office Mandates
Not everyone has welcomed the shift. In 2024 and 2025, we’ve seen a wave of large employers trying to claw back some of the pre-pandemic normal — what’s become known in the media as “return to office mandates.”
Amazon, JP Morgan, and John Lewis are among those who’ve introduced policies requiring staff to be physically present for a set number of days per week. The justification varies — better collaboration, stronger culture, improved productivity. But the resistance has been remarkable.
A major study by King’s College London, based on 50,000 respondents, found that in 2024 only 42% of UK workers said they would comply with a full-time return-to-office mandate — down from 54% just two years earlier. Half said they would look for another job rather than comply.
Research from the same team found no evidence of a mass return to offices, with working-from-home rates remaining stable since 2022. Despite the headlines, the data shows most employers have not actually shifted hard towards eliminating remote work. The noise is louder than the reality.
The debate is real, though. Up to 66% of professionals believe their employer is asking them back to the office simply because “that’s how it’s always been done” — not because of any compelling productivity evidence. That trust gap between employer and employee is one of the more subtle but significant legacies of the pandemic era.
The Bigger Picture: What Lockdown Actually Taught Us About Work
I think there are a few honest lessons here that go beyond the statistics.
Work is about output, not presence. This is the shift that matters most. Lockdown forced employers to manage people by results rather than by watching them sit at a desk. For good managers, that was fine. For those who relied on physical presence to feel in control, it was deeply uncomfortable.
Flexibility is now an expectation, not a bonus. For younger workers especially, the idea of a rigid five-day office week feels almost anachronistic. They’ve grown up in a world where Covid happened, and where it was proven that another way is possible. That expectation isn’t going away.
The commute is no longer a given. Spending two hours a day on a train or a motorway is time — time that, during lockdown, people discovered they could reclaim. Many are simply not prepared to give it back.
Not everyone benefits equally. It’s worth saying clearly: hybrid and remote working is heavily skewed towards better-paid, office-based roles. Between January and March 2025, 45% of workers earning £50,000 or more had hybrid arrangements, compared with just 8% of those earning under £20,000. Those in retail, healthcare, construction, and other hands-on industries — including emergency services — had no such choice. The pandemic deepened existing inequalities in the workforce, and the new working landscape has not resolved that.
So What Now?
The honest answer is that we’re still figuring it out.
Hybrid working has become the dominant model for those who can access it — but there’s no settled consensus on what “fair” looks like. How many days is reasonable to ask someone to come in? Who decides? What happens when teams are split across home and office and some people feel they’re missing out on face time with managers?
These questions don’t have easy answers. They require genuine conversation between employers and employees — the kind of trust-based communication that lockdown, in some workplaces, either built or destroyed.
What is clear is that the world of work that existed in February 2020 is gone. Not everything about that world was worth preserving. The commuter grind, the presenteeism culture, the assumption that being seen was the same as being productive — these were habits, not necessities.
Lockdown held a mirror up to all of that. What we choose to do with what we saw is still being decided.
I wrote Preparing for Lockdown partly because of everything the pandemic showed us about how unprepared most families were — not just for working from home, but for any kind of disruption to normal life. If that resonates, please buy your copy today.
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