Remote work, five years after the ‘new normal’

When remote work went mainstream in 2020, most of us were just trying to find a quiet corner of the house and a half-decent Wi-Fi signal. Kids wandered into calls. Pets became unofficial team mascots. Kitchen tables turned into hot desks.

Five years later, remote work is no longer “the future of work”. It is just… work.

At Matrix, we are a Dublin digital agency that now works almost entirely remotely across Ireland and Europe. We have lived through the shock phase, the honeymoon period and the quiet backlash that followed. We have seen clients rush into remote, relax into it, and then start to question it.

This is our honest take on where remote work stands now: what has actually changed, what has quietly gone back to normal, and where digital tools help or get in the way.

How remote work went from shock to status quo

If you rewind to early 2020, remote work in corporate Ireland felt like a sudden experiment nobody had planned:

• Laptops were grabbed from offices and plugged in beside laundry baskets and Lego.
• Teams that had never used video calls were suddenly living inside them.
• Long-standing processes were rewritten in a week because there was no other choice.

That was the shock phase. Survival mode.

Then came the honeymoon period:

• No commute, no packed trains, no battling for car parking.
• More time with family, or at least more time not spent sitting in traffic.
• A sense that “work” had finally caught up with how digital life already felt outside the office.

People talked about never going back. Headlines declared the office “dead”.

Five years on, things look more mixed. Many organisations have nudged people back into the office for part of the week. Some have gone fully back on-site. Others, like Matrix, stayed remote by design. Most businesses now live somewhere in the middle, trying to balance flexibility with culture, mentoring and the odd tough conversation that feels better in person.

Remote work before it was cool

It can feel like remote work began in 2020. It did not.

Long before the pandemic, there were:

• Distributed software teams building global products without a shared office.
• Freelance designers sending files around the world from spare rooms and coffee shops.
• Open source communities collaborating on code with people they had never met offline.

If you had a developer in Galway, a designer in Berlin and a client in London in 2015, you were seen as slightly unconventional. Now, for many digital projects, that mix is just Tuesday.

For Matrix, working on European projects made remote collaboration normal even before COVID. EU-funded programmes brought together partners from multiple countries, often with different native languages, time zones and ways of working. When the world locked down, that experience helped. We were already used to:

• Running workshops online.
• Co-creating content and UX in shared tools instead of whiteboards in a meeting room.
• Making decisions in writing so that everyone in the consortium could follow along.

The difference now is scale. Techniques that were once niche are suddenly expected by teams of every size, from local SMEs to large European organisations.

If remote work had existed before the internet…

To see how far we have come, it is fun to imagine “remote work” without the internet.

You might have had:

• Weekly “remote meetings” where everyone dialled into a crackly speakerphone and nobody was quite sure who was talking.
• Slide decks printed and couriered to each participant, with last-minute changes scribbled in pen.
• Feedback sent via fax, page by page, slowly crawling out of the machine.
• Project updates arriving as thick envelopes of paper, read on the train and filed in metal cabinets.

The idea of running an entire international project that way, from home, is almost comic now. That is the point. Modern remote work is only possible because digital tools quietly took over so many boring parts of collaboration: sending files, tracking changes, agreeing schedules, keeping records.

The real magic in remote work is not the video call. It is everything that happens around it.

From boardrooms to browser tabs: how meetings really changed

In the past, an international corporate meeting might mean:

• Weeks of back-and-forth to agree dates.
• Flights, hotels, taxis and paper itineraries.
• A full day of travel for a two-hour discussion.

There was value in that. People bonded over meals, side conversations and getting lost in unfamiliar streets. Decisions felt weighty because so much effort went into the meeting itself.

Now, a similar cross-border session often looks like this:

• A calendar link appears with three time zones already adjusted.
• Everyone joins from a laptop, sometimes with a blurred background and a mug of coffee.
• Slides sit in the cloud. Notes are typed as you talk. Actions are assigned in real time.

For Matrix, that shift has been huge. We can:

• Move faster on EU and Irish projects without flying for every minor decision.
• Bring in the right specialist from our team for twenty minutes instead of dragging them away for a full day.
• Share screens, prototypes and test results instantly, instead of waiting for the “next big meeting”.

Of course, the downside is obvious: it is now very easy to have too many meetings. When gathering ten people from four countries is as simple as adding another invitee, you have to be deliberate about what actually deserves a call.

What we have learned about making remote work, work

As a remote-first Dublin digital agency, we have picked up a few habits that help remote collaboration feel a bit more human and a lot more sustainable.

1. Make the invisible visible
   In a physical office, people can see if you are deep in work, stressed or free for a quick question. Remotely, everything looks the same: a green dot beside your name. We try to:

• Use simple, shared rules around status and availability.
• Keep key decisions in writing so nobody is left guessing.
• Summarise meetings clearly so people who could not attend are not left behind.

2. Treat writing as part of the job
   Remote work lives or dies on written communication. Vague emails and fuzzy briefs cost more time when you cannot swivel your chair to ask for clarity. That is why we spend real time on:

• Clear project briefs.
• Straightforward status updates.
• Documentation that a new person can understand on their first day.

It is not glamorous, but it saves hours of confusion later.

3. Design small rituals, not big gimmicks
   Remote work does not need constant online quizzes or forced fun. It does benefit from simple habits, like:

• Regular check-ins that focus on blockers, not just tasks.
• Short one-to-ones that are allowed to include “how are you, really?”.
• Occasional in-person days that are aligned with important moments, like kick-offs or retrospectives.

Where remote still struggles

Remote work is not perfect. There are areas where it can expose weaknesses in culture and process.

We see teams find it hardest when:

• New starters are expected to “just pick things up” without structured onboarding.
• Junior staff do not get to overhear how more experienced colleagues handle tricky calls.
• Complex decisions are dragged out over endless email threads and half-attended calls.

That is why many of the organisations we work with are moving towards thoughtful hybrid models. They might:

• Bring people together in person for strategy, relationship-building and deep workshops.
• Use remote time for focused work, day-to-day collaboration and regular reporting.

The exact mix is different for every business. The common thread is intent. Remote is not treated as a quick fix or a perk. It is treated as a design choice.

What this means for Irish and European businesses now

If you are responsible for how your organisation works in 2025, you are no longer deciding whether remote work exists. It already does. Your real questions are:

• Which work truly benefits from being in the same room?
• Which work is actually done better, faster and happier when people are remote?
• Do our tools and platforms make that split easier, or more frustrating?

From our perspective as a Dublin digital agency, the tech is the easy part. Most teams already have access to good video calls, shared documents and project tools. The harder part is making those tools feel like a coherent, human system rather than a pile of tabs.

That is where we help clients most:

• Designing platforms and websites that work just as well on a kitchen-table laptop as on a boardroom screen.
• Creating content and workflows that respect people’s time and attention.
• Helping Irish and European organisations think through how their digital infrastructure supports remote and hybrid teams, not just customers.

Remote work is no longer new. It is plumbing. The opportunity now is to make that plumbing invisible again, so people can concentrate on the real work in front of them.

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