Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
Every few months, someone announces that remote work is finished. The data keeps refusing to cooperate.
This morning, MPR News covered a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and the finding is refreshingly plain: the share of American workers who do at least some of their work from home has stayed steady since 2024, even as return-to-office mandates keep making headlines.
Here is what the report actually says. Haley Chinander, an analyst at the Minneapolis Fed, dug into Census Bureau Current Population Survey data and found that nearly 22 percent of U.S. workers still worked from home at least part of the time in 2025. That is only about one percentage point lower than in 2024. Fortune reported that the pattern carried straight into 2026, with hybrid and fully remote work combined at 22.3 percent in January and 22 percent in February.
The details are more interesting than the headline. Hybrid schedules have actually increased slightly, while fully remote roles have seen only a small decline. Where remote work did drop noticeably, the cause was policy rather than preference. The Fed points to public administration, where a 2025 federal executive order pushed employees back to fully in-person schedules and several state governments followed with their own mandates.
In the private sector, meanwhile, the five-day office week is close to extinct at large companies. Kyle de Bruin, managing director at workplace research firm Leesman, told Fortune that only about 3 percent of the large companies his firm surveys are fully in office five days a week.
None of this surprises me. Most of the clients I work with at Rellatech never went back to a full office, and plenty never had one to begin with. Remote and hybrid work stopped being an experiment a long time ago. It is simply how businesses operate now, especially smaller ones that never wanted the lease in the first place.
But here is the part the headlines skip. Distributed work only feels easy when someone is running the operations behind it. When your team is spread across cities or time zones, the inbox, the calendar, the CRM, and the follow-up become the connective tissue of the business. If nobody is looking after those, remote work stops feeling flexible and starts feeling chaotic.
That is exactly the work I do at Rellatech. My executive assistant services keep scheduling, inboxes, and client communication moving no matter where your team sits, and my operations support handles the systems underneath.
Build operations that fit how you actually work
If your business runs remote or hybrid, and the Fed says it probably does, the question is no longer whether the model works. It is whether your operations are built for it. My monthly retainers give businesses and startups with teams a dedicated assistant who keeps the day-to-day running, so distributed work stays the advantage it was supposed to be. If that sounds like the missing piece, book a consultation and I will map it out with you.
Contact MeNot ready for a call? Take the free operations assessment and I will send you a written breakdown within 24 hours.