Last year, it seemed the traditional American office was a dinosaur ready for its comet closeup. A woolly mammoth with a one-way ticket to the tar pits. A buggy whip manufacturer setting up shop the day after Model Ts started rolling down the assembly line. You get the idea: extinct, obsolete and irrelevant.

Executives championed their new work-from-anywhere policies, and countless opinion pieces lamented what the new – and surely permanent – wave of remote work would mean for the economy of abandoned city centers.

Those lamentations were a bit premature. Now that the country is reopening, many companies are itching to pull a Jurassic Park and revive office culture – regardless of if employees are on board. To paraphrase the esteemed Jeff Goldblum, they’re so preoccupied with whether or not they can reopen the office, they haven’t stopped to think whether they should.

2020 was a fraught and stressful time for many reasons, not the least of which was the abrupt way millions of workers were forced to relocate their workstations from cubicles to spare bedrooms or dinner tables (or, in  my case, in the living room on a comfy gliding chair with the laptop perched for the first time ever in my actual lap!). It turns out, though, that remote work actually, well, works. Multiple studies have been released showing that employees can be just as, if not more, productive than their in-office counterparts. Earlier this year, 83% of employers surveyed by PwC said the shift to remote work has been successful for their company, compared to 73% who had a favorable view of WFH in its June 2020 study. In that same study, 55% of employees say they’d like to remain remote at least three days a week.

The benefits are manifold: The absence of a daily commute adds precious minutes (and sometimes hours) back into the day; there’s no need to don “hard pants” if you don’t want to; the possibility of flexible hours can help enhance work-life balance; you can save money by brewing your own coffee and whipping together lunch every day – and there’s no one to complain if you pop last night’s leftover fish in the microwave at noon.

There have been plenty of drawbacks too, especially for parents of young children who had to juggle virtual school and a full-time job. Remote work can blur the line between home life and work life in ways that aren’t always healthy: It’s tempting to get distracted by unfinished chores when you’re supposed to be working, just as it’s easy get caught up in an endless cycle of “just one last email” when you’re supposed to be logged off and decompressing with family and friends. Depending on your temperament, remote work can feel isolating. Plus, Zoom fatigue is no joke.

Still, many employees found themselves thriving in their home offices. Also of note: There have been more than a few cases where people took advantage of new work-from-anywhere policies to do just that – pulling up stakes to relocate to another city or state.

The year-plus of successful remote work has made converts of several stalwart in-the-office types on ASI Media’s staff. I, of course, needed no convincing. I’ve always been a proponent of remote work, and the last year just cemented my preference. Do I miss seeing nondigital versions of my coworkers’ lovely faces? Sure. But in the office I wouldn’t be getting impromptu guest appearances of their cute kids, cats, puppies and birds. Is working collaboratively sometimes a challenge from afar? Again, yes. But technology used correctly can, for the most part, solve those issues.

That’s why the trend, at large, to return to the office has been so disheartening and feels, for many, like a bait-and-switch from what executives had been proclaiming at the height of the pandemic. Earlier this month, Apple employees pushed back against a new policy that required them to go back into the office three days a week in September. In an internal letter, the employees said the lack of flexibility around remote work had already forced some to quit. “Many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple,” the letter stated.

In fact, 65% of workers who went remote during the pandemic say they’d like to remain fully remote after, according to a recent survey conducted by job search site FlexJobs; 58% of respondents said they’d absolutely look for a new job if they can’t continue remote work in their current role. That’s something I saw in my reporting last month on the promotional products industry’s return to the office. Though many suppliers and distributors had already reopened their offices or were in the process of doing so, there was a contingent looking to implement hybrid or fully remote options: “I wouldn’t take a new job unless they stated I could work remotely,” Jason Storms, account manager at Printcbf in Cedar Knolls, NJ, told me.

The potential loss of company culture is often brought up as a drawback of the distributed workforce. But company culture is a nebulous and sometimes abused concept. It’s not about how many ping-pong tables you can cram into the breakroom or the occasional catered lunch. Those are a nice bonus, but ultimately meaningless if an employer isn’t transparent with its staff or if workers don’t feel acknowledged and appreciated. There are ways (beyond the tired Zoom happy hour) to keep remote workers engaged and ensure they’re part of the team. It requires you think outside the cubicle. But for the promo industry, which prides itself on coming up with creative solutions for clients, that should be a piece of (individually wrapped and drop-shipped to a home address) cake.

In our current tight labor market – where employees often have the upper hand and various industries struggle to find and retain talent – it’s more imperative than ever to offer what people really want. For many, it’s the flexibility to work from anywhere.