America needs a smarter work from home policy, and Britain’s House of Lords has offered the right starting point: stop treating remote work as either a perk to protect or a problem to eliminate. The real question is what arrangement helps public servants do the work well, serve the public effectively, and stay in jobs that government increasingly struggles to fill.
The UK report’s strongest lesson is its refusal to embrace a universal rule. Home-based and hybrid work can improve recruitment, retention, disability inclusion, caregiving support, and regional opportunity. It can also weaken mentoring, collaboration, onboarding, and workplace culture when managers fail to design it carefully. That balanced view is exactly what U.S. federal and state governments need now.
Washington has moved toward broad return-to-office requirements. President Trump’s 2025 return to in-person work memorandum directed federal agencies to end many remote-work arrangements and bring employees back to their duty stations full time, with exceptions. Several states have followed the same path. Ohio ordered many state employees back to offices through an executive order on state employees, while California set a default expectation of four in-office days per week for many state workers through its return to office order.
Some in-person work is essential. Government needs secure collaboration, public-facing services, emergency response, mentoring, and institutional culture. But government office mandates should not pretend that physical presence automatically equals accountability. The better standard is performance: case backlogs, response times, service quality, staff retention, recruitment speed, employee engagement, office utilization, and citizen satisfaction.
The UK report also makes clear that remote work is not just a convenience issue. It is a labor-force issue. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper on disability employment found that increased working from home explained a substantial share of the post-pandemic rise in full-time employment among people with physical disabilities. That should matter to every governor and agency head trying to fill public-sector vacancies. Remote and hybrid options can help government compete for talent, retain experienced workers, and expand access for people who face commuting, health, caregiving, or geographic barriers.
The United States should not simply copy Britain’s approach. It should improve on it. Federal agencies and state governments should classify roles by function: site-required, hybrid-eligible, or remote-eligible. They should require managers to justify why location matters for specific tasks, not rely on blanket assumptions. They should train supervisors to manage hybrid teams, onboard new hires, coordinate anchor days, protect boundaries, and measure outcomes. A serious state telework policy should be transparent, auditable, and tied to public-service results.
The U.S. also needs better remote work data. Agencies should track what hybrid work does to productivity, equity, disability accommodations, real estate costs, cybersecurity, turnover, and service delivery. States must also address complications Britain does not face in the same way, especially interstate taxation, payroll, workers’ compensation, and licensing. The National Conference of State Legislatures has warned that remote work can create complex state and local tax issues when employees work across borders.
The lesson from Britain is not that everyone should work from home. It is that serious governments should stop governing by slogan. The next stage of remote work reform should be evidence-based, role-specific, and focused on public value. Presence matters when the work demands it. Flexibility matters when it improves hiring, retention, inclusion, and performance. The governments that learn to tell the difference will serve citizens better than those that confuse office attendance with productivity.
About the Author
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky was named “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with Generative AI. He serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his two most recent ones are Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams and ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.
