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.
Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace research uncovered a “remote work paradox.” Fully remote workers report the highest engagement rates at 31%, compared to other work arrangements. But those same remote workers are less likely to be thriving in their lives overall—only 36% compared to 42% for hybrid and on-site workers—and they report higher rates of stress, loneliness, anger, and sadness.
Three factors likely drive this paradox:
- Remote work can feel like "just work" without the friendships and camaraderie that come more easily in a physical office. Gallup notes that sharing meals with others is as strong an indicator of well-being as income. When remote workers lose team lunches or the opportunity for that impromptu after-work drink, isolation increases.
- Autonomy without boundaries creates stress. While autonomy boosts engagement, it becomes a burden without clear expectations. Managing time independently and coordinating with others across digital channels requires more cognitive load than many managers recognize.
- Technology frustrates more than it connects. Gallup puts forward that remote work requiring high coordination is significantly harder than independent remote work. Digital collaboration tools create friction that in-person interaction doesn't have, and remote employees often lack access to resources available on-site.
The business case for addressing this paradox is straightforward. Gallup’s same report states that 57% of fully remote workers are actively or passively looking for new jobs. Among engaged remote workers, that drops to 47%. But when remote workers are both engaged and thriving, only 38% are job hunting.
This is where management quality becomes critical. However, TechSmith's 2024 Workplace Flexibility Trends Report found that 75% of managers have not received training specifically for remote work. Without deliberate investment in developing remote leadership capabilities, companies leave engagement and retention gains on the table.
What does effective remote leadership look like in practice? Maria Jose Lorenzo, director of talent acquisition at Near, describes how her own fully remote team maintains connection: “In a 100% remote team, engagement thrives when we deliberately prioritize social connection: creating intentional spaces for peer and group work, integrating teamwork and communication into our daily routines and trainings, and building casual chats and remote gatherings where people get to know each other as humans beyond the job.”
One way to reinforce this practice is with a guided onboarding journey that combines clarity in expectations, support, and a dedicated onboarding buddy. “An essential part of our work as leaders is being present: paying attention, noticing shifts in energy and team needs, and responding to them,” Lorenzo adds “This is where leaders build trust and credibility with their teams.”
The managers who will succeed at leading distributed teams in 2026 will be those who actively address well-being by creating boundaries, facilitating social connection, and preventing the isolation that drives talented people away.
Lesson 3: Forcing people back to the office is a retention risk
Many employees now see flexibility as nonnegotiable, and return-to-office mandates that ignore that reality are basically a voluntary attrition strategy.
A 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 2,315 U.S. workers showed 46% of remote workers would be unlikely to stay with employers who ended flexible arrangements, rising to 61% among fully remote workers.
According to FlexJobs’ 2025 State of the Workforce Report, based on a survey of more than 3,000 U.S. professionals in August 2025, “69% of workers would accept a pay cut for remote work, an 11% increase from 2024.”
Flexibility isn’t just a “nice-to-have” benefit in those datasets; it’s increasingly at the top of the decision tree for a lot of folks.
There’s also an equity and participation cost to ignoring flexibility. A 2025 TIME analysis of U.S. labor data found that more than 212,000 women aged 20 and over have left the workforce since January 2025, with experts pointing to RTO mandates and rising childcare costs as key drivers.
For employers, that’s not just a gender equity problem; it’s a loss of experienced, hard-to-replace talent.
Put simply, a hard line on full-time office work is a hard line against what many employees say they need to stay in their jobs. For 2026 workforce planning, the question isn’t “How do we get everyone back to their desks?” It’s “How much turnover and hiring friction are we willing to accept if we ignore that flexibility has become table stakes for attracting and retaining talent?”
Lesson 4: Time zone alignment is a strategic advantage
Companies have hired outside the U.S. for cost advantages for decades. Hiring in Asia and Eastern Europe has long offered access to skilled professionals at lower salary rates driven by regional cost-of-living differences.
But one thing became increasingly clear in 2025: When companies have a choice, they prefer hiring talent in U.S.-aligned time zones. It’s not just about convenience. It’s about productivity, communication quality, and the ability for teams to actually feel like teams.
In Near’s 2025 report on Why U.S. Companies Hire in Latin America, based on more than 2,000 conversations with U.S. employers, 30% of companies were switching from offshore markets like India or the Philippines to nearshore hiring in Latin America for better real-time collaboration and fewer coordination barriers. This is a clear signal that time zone alignment is no longer a “nice-to-have” but increasingly a priority.
Time zone gaps create more problems than delayed responses. A study by Harvard Business School of 12,038 employees of a multinational company showed that time zone differences mean that some workers are “likely to experience pressure to work non-traditional or nonlinear workdays.”
Anyone who has worked with talent in the Philippines knows that to cover U.S. business hours, workers often work night shifts, creating some of the well-being challenges documented in Lesson 2.
Nearshore talent hits the sweet spot. Companies still benefit from meaningful cost efficiency (normally 30%-70% lower salary costs compared to hiring in the U.S.) without sacrificing the synchronous collaboration that makes distributed work feel sustainable for teams and managers.
Managers can notice when someone seems off, catch warning signs of burnout, and address issues before they escalate.
And perhaps most importantly, nearshore time zone alignment enables the kind of daily interaction that helps distributed workers feel connected to colleagues rather than isolated behind screens. Teams can schedule all-hands meetings during normal business hours, celebrate wins together, and build the relationships that make remote work sustainable rather than draining.
In short, distributed teams function best when people can actually work together (without anyone having to work at 2 a.m.).
In this way, U.S. and Latin American-based team members operate no differently than hybrid setups within the U.S., where most interactions happen over Zoom, unless everyone's in the office on the same day. The work is distributed, but the teams can still function as teams.
As companies refine their remote and hybrid strategies heading into 2026, prioritizing time zone alignment directly supports engagement, well-being, managerial effectiveness, and the overall productivity gains distributed teams are capable of achieving.
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.
