At 9pm, shops, restaurants and cafes go dark across the city of Cairo, where a stringent curfew has been imposed to mitigate the energy shock triggered by the conflict in the Gulf. The measure may prove difficult to enforce among people accustomed to long, convivial evenings, but the outlook is far from reassuring. Reports from inland areas indicate that petrol stations are running dry, raising fears that the emergency will last longer than expected.
Parts of Africa and Asia appear to be ahead of Europe in confronting resource scarcity. Many decisive measures have already been adopted: a mandatory work-from-home day in Egypt, an additional weekly day off in Sri Lanka, a four-day workweek for public-sector workers in the Philippines, university campus closures in Bangladesh, fuel consumption controls in Myanmar and rolling blackouts in South Sudan.
While supply constraints may be less acute in Europe, this does not amount to immunity. EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen has acknowledged this, warning that Europe is facing a “very serious situation” with no clear end in sight.
He has pointed to recommendations from the International Energy Agency. These include working from home where possible, reducing highway speed limits, encouraging the use of public transport, and avoiding unnecessary trips.
The EU is now set to present a non-binding initiative promoting remote working as a way to ease the energy crisis by reducing commuting and office energy use.
Despite firm recommendations and restrictions, the prevailing rhetoric is that these drastic times call for drastic – yet temporary – measures, and once the current crisis blows over, everything will go right back to normal. If this seems all too familiar, it is because we have been here before.
Crisis response déjà vu
The parallels with measures taken to combat the Covid-19 pandemic are striking, but one element stands out: remote work. The home office is once again being mobilised as a crisis response, reinforcing the idea that only exceptional circumstances can justify changes in work patterns.
In 2020, the aim was to “flatten the infection curve”, while today office blocks are left underoccupied to reduce energy consumption. And yet the current scramble of uneven measures is more than a little reminiscent of the pandemic years. Institutional, business, labour and political leaders seem to be caught off-guard once again.
Meanwhile, the effects of the war are materialising in the form of stagflation (inflation without growth), coupled with a contraction of global trade against a backdrop of mounting ecological strain. These converging pressures are forcing us to rethink the organisation of work, while also making structural investment in sustainability more politically viable.
In short, it is becoming very hard to justify resistance to more “unorthodox” working methods that could reduce reliance on fossil fuel energy.
Equally concerning is the risk that workers’ experiences of flexible arrangements will be shaped by this erratic, emergency-driven approach – they are sent back home when governments or corporations face mounting stress, and called straight back to the office once it ends.
At the outset of the pandemic, governments, businesses and ordinary people alike were thrust into the unknown. Parents were suddenly forced to juggle work with childcare and schooling, while new hires improvised makeshift desks in noisy shared apartments.
With the current oil crisis, the pattern is repeating itself. But the exodus from headquarters is driven less by protecting public health or a commitment to better working conditions, and more by short-term cost-cutting considerations.
Back-to-office mandates
In public debate, the question of remote work has become deeply polarised, not least due to the stance adopted by some CEOs – among them leaders at Amazon, X and Goldman Sachs – who have imposed strict return-to-office (RTO) mandates. In some cases, RTOs have even been used as a mechanism to push voluntary resignations, effectively reducing headcount without resorting to formal layoffs.
Workers are increasingly being pushed back to the office, or granted remote work only under carefully calibrated conditions – many arrangements preclude remote work on Mondays and Fridays, for instance – to ensure that flexibility does not translate into freedom of movement.
Moreover, only a limited number of companies have invested the time and resources needed to create work environments that are truly equipped for off-site work. Research points to a deep, persistent suspicion of unsupervised worker autonomy, increasingly reflected in the use of surveillance technologies such as keystroke monitoring, periodic screenshots and email scanning.
When permitted, working from home has become a breeding ground for these “bossware” tools, supporting the perception that remote work is merely a reluctant concession.
Remote work benefits everyone
Evidence challenges this antiquated approach. Stanford economist Nick Bloom shows that hybrid remote work has stabilised into a “new normal”. In the United States, it has plateaued at around 28% of paid workdays as of 2025-2026 – a dramatic increase from the pre-pandemic level of just 5% – with no negative economic repercussions.
In Europe too, forward-looking experiments abound. Employers across sectors are testing more flexible arrangements – from unlimited work-from-anywhere policies to shorter working weeks – to attract and retain talent.
Achieving a truly functional and virtuous model of working beyond company premises requires a significant degree of bottom-up inventiveness. But the stalled promise of a managerial revolution could also be delivered through a more supportive legal framework.
At the EU level, such a process has already been set in motion, following the European Parliament’s 2021 call for action. So far, two rounds of consultation with social partners have been organised, with the aim of introducing a workers’ right to disconnect and ensuring “fair” telework.
The vision underpinning the consultation appears to be shaped by a combination of legitimate yet often overstated concerns. Remote work is seen as a catalyst for permanent online availability and as a threat to safety and health. What is largely missing, however, is a more ambitious attempt to seize this policy moment as an opportunity to rethink the organisation of working time.
Current regulatory frameworks remain anchored in a model that is linear, rigid, hierarchical and male-biased. What reality demands, instead, is a transition towards more asynchronous, sustainable, collaborative and empowering ways of organising time and space.
Stop improvising, start anticipating
Institutions at all levels could move beyond good intentions and start practising what they preach. According to the 2024 OECD/EU survey of public servants, around two in five (37.2%) never work remotely, while only one in five (22.6%) do so one to two days per week.
Yet voluntary remote work – whether regular or occasional – is associated with higher levels of wellbeing. This is particularly relevant for workers engaged in back-office functions or providing call-based citizen services, for whom office presence is often not a necessity.
If discussing remote work in times of crisis sounds frivolous, so too is clinging to outdated ways of organising work. Workers commuting to the office only to join Zoom calls with clients, managers sitting in traffic just to reach a cubicle and send emails, consultants flown in for a ten-minute presentation – all of this reflects a backward-looking culture that is long overdue for retirement. It also exposes the limits of a model that presumes the world’s resources are limitless.
Younger generations are no longer willing to trade freedom and purpose for attendance and conformity. A greater degree of managerial maturity should now be expected.
Reconfiguring collaboration flows, work structures and organisational patterns should not be treated as a temporary fix, but as a long-term investment (with positive spillover effects in terms of productivity). Within this shift, rethinking working time must be the next step in breaking long-standing taboos.
Today, as workplaces face their third crisis in six years, the real question is not whether remote work should be the norm, but why it is taking yet another disaster to transform how we organise work.
