Summary
Prithwiraj Choudhury explains what work from anywhere really means and why it is different from remote or traditional hybrid work. He defines work from anywhere as giving employees the freedom to choose where they live, while allowing flexibility in how and where work is carried out.
Drawing on research and real-world examples, Choudhury shows how work from anywhere expands access to global talent and has become the dominant model for startups and increasingly for large organisations. He also challenges narrow definitions of hybrid work, outlining three distinct models – weekly, monthly and quarterly hybrid – and argues that teams should design in-person time intentionally, typically accounting for 25–40% of working days.
For decades, the office was the single stage for performance. Now, it’s just one of many. In this short Forward Thinkers video Prithwiraj Choudhury, professor at the London School of Economics and bestselling author of The World Is Your Office, explains how work from anywhere is redefining where and how organisations compete for talent.
- Learn why companies like Spotify, Atlassian, Airbnb and even the European Central Bank are embracing this model.
- Understand how startups like Zapier use it to access global skills and scale fast.
- Explore the three new forms of hybrid work – weekly, monthly and quarterly – and how to choose what’s right for your team.
As Choudhury reveals, this isn’t about flexibility for its own sake. It’s about building smarter, more inclusive organisations that can hire and thrive anywhere.
👉 Watch now to rethink hybrid and discover how “anywhere” could be your biggest competitive advantage
Transcript
The office used to be the single performative stage for work for decades and that's completely changed now. So the idea of work from anywhere is that people can live where they want to live and they can perform their work across multiple locations. Work from anywhere is not the same as work from anywhere.
What “work from anywhere” really means
Work from anywhere is the idea that you give workers the freedom to choose where to live. So which city, which town, which part of the country, which state, and sometimes even which country they want to live. And once they've chosen that location, they could work from home, they could work from a co-working space, they can all come together in a small satellite office if enough people are around. All of that is work from anywhere.
Why work from anywhere is a win-win
So work from anywhere again is the freedom to choose geography. And this is extremely important because it's a win-win. For the worker, it creates lots of benefits, but also for the companies, it is amazing because it expands your hiring. So companies that practice work from anywhere can now hire from anywhere.
There are many large tech companies and I'll mention a few. Spotify, Shopify, Atlassian, Airbnb, NVIDIA, which is one of the world's most highly valued companies. They are all practicing work from anywhere. But outside of tech, there are many large organizations practicing work from anywhere.
The European Central Bank, ECB. The ECB has a 110-day work from anywhere policy. And so if you are an ECB banker, you can work for 90 days anywhere in Europe and then 20 days anywhere in the world. And the memorandum, which everyone should read on this policy, which was adopted earlier this year, mentions why the ECB is doing this, because it's helping the ECB compete for talent. So now, against the large private banks, such as Deutsche Bank, they have something to offer.
Work from anywhere has actually become the dominant model for startups. So if you are starting a company today, you are invariably going to start with the work from anywhere model. Why is that? So I'll give you one example of a company I've studied quite a bit. So this is a company called Zapier. They have about 1,000 employees now, a little more. And if you think about Zapier 10 years back, they would probably be based in Silicon Valley. They would be competing for talent against Google and Facebook. But now, because they are all remote, they have no offices, their 1,000 people come from over 30 countries and over 170 cities. So the global access to talent has dramatically shifted. And this is especially helping startups.
The three types of hybrid work
About 25 to 40% days should be in person, about 25 to 40% days and we can talk about what in person means, how to design in person. But here is the thing. So in the book, what I try to do is I try to open our minds to what hybrid means. So what most people call hybrid is what I call weekly hybrid. And in the book, I say there are at least two other hybrid models, one which I call monthly hybrid, where the team is living, say all over England, but getting together one week every month. then you take the train, you come to London, you spend three or four days with the team in the first week of the month or the last week of the month. I call that monthly hybrid.
And then there's a third form of hybrid, which I've called quarterly hybrid, where you're now living all over Europe, but once a quarter, you're coming together with the entire team and that quarterly meeting can move from location to location. So one quarter it's in Portugal the next quarter It's in Germany based on where people live or where the conferences are so on so forth so in summary we need to be in person about 25 to 40% days and that can be arranged in three forms of hybrid: the weekly model the monthly model and the quarterly model and each team should do what's right by them
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