Rethinking remote work as distributed teams recast work across borders
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — Business leaders remain entangled in the return-to-office (RTO) debate. Still, data suggests they are asking the wrong questions and ignoring the reality of how modern workforces already operate.
Published by the World Economic Forum, Alexandre Bouaziz, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of HR platform Deel, writes that rather than focusing on where employees sit, companies must shift their attention to maximizing productivity across time zones and borders, as the world’s most competitive organizations are already leveraging distributed teams as a strategic advantage.
RTO debate misses the reality of distributed operations
The current debate between executives who issue mandates and employees who resist has dominated business headlines, yet this dichotomy has not taken into account the basic framework of modern business.
Where a company has many time zones, many offices, or even multiple floors in the same building, it is already negotiating the basics of distributed work, including cross-cultural collaboration and asynchrony. This fact was only put into perspective by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bouaziz notes, “Companies have been distributed for decades. But where there was once a maze of infrastructure nightmares, there’s now technology that can fill the void and make distributed work seamless.”
In the case of businesses with headquarters in large metropolises and a workforce distributed around the world, such as in London, a sales team, in Berlin, a team of engineers, and in São Paulo, a group of support personnel, the distinction between in-office and remote work disappears.
These organizations are, by definition, distributed organizations that, coincidentally, have an RTO policy, but this is just a structural reality that many leaders are unaware of.
With the advent of modern technology, the logistical nightmare it used to be has become a smooth-running template. However, the business discourse is still languishing over attendance policies rather than output management.
Hiring data prioritizes strategic talent
In direct contrast to the incessant myths surrounding outsourcing and labor arbitrage, the information presented in the 2025 State of Global Hiring Report, compiled by Deel and examining more than a billion worker contracts, can help refute the notion that reducing costs is the key driver of international hiring.
The best places to recruit cross-border in 2020-25: The top places to hire in the 100 plus start-ups launched between 2020 to 2025 with over $100 million of financing include the United Kingdom (12.2%), Canada (11.9%), Germany (8.8%), Australia (5.8%) and Spain (5.2%), which are high-cost, high-skill markets, defying the conventional outsourcing.
The 28% of these cross-border hires are software developers, followed by tech sales professionals and AI engineers. Start-ups with high funding are much more likely (13.6%) to hire software developers abroad than small companies overall.
Moreover, the idea that remote workers have scattered to remote rural areas is not true, as statistics indicate that the average distance of remote workers to large cities has been decreasing every year since 2022.
People in the United States are now within walking/driving distance of cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with the same trend observed in London and Paris.
“The return-to-office debate will continue. But the companies that will define the next decade aren’t waiting for it to resolve. They’re building teams that are a far cry from 2019’s org charts. And they’re treating distributed work not as a concession, but as a competitive advantage,” Bouaziz said.
“Every company does remote work. The only question is whether you’re doing it right.”
As companies expand across borders and time zones, the future of work is likely to be shaped less by office attendance mandates than by how effectively employers build systems that manage distributed talent, collaboration, and output at scale.
