A little background
IBM, the tech giant that invented remote work – then killed it
Long before Slack threads, Zoom calls, and the pandemic exodus from corporate offices, one company quietly ran what may be the most ambitious remote-work experiment in tech history.
IBM built the playbook, scaled it to hundreds of thousands of employees, marketed its expertise to the world – and then, in a move that stunned the industry, ordered everyone back to their desks.
In 1979, Big Blue allowed five employees to work from home using terminals connected to the company's mainframes, a pilot designed in part to ease congestion on its overloaded internal computing systems. By 1983 the program had expanded to roughly 2,000 employees, and over the following three decades it kept growing. The timing was no accident: the term "telecommuting" had only been coined in 1973 by NASA engineer Jack Nilles, and IBM became the first major corporation to put the theory into practice at scale.
By 2009, around 40% of IBM's 386,000-person global workforce was remote, a scale no other major corporation came close to matching. The company reported it had shed 78 million square feet of office space along the way, and it publicly credited the program with saving roughly $100 million annually in US real estate costs.
IBM even sold consulting services helping other companies design their own telecommuting arrangements, and its own 2014 white paper from the Smarter Workplace Institute argued that remote workers were happier, less stressed, more productive, and more engaged than their office-bound peers.
But then, in February 2017, IBM reversed course. Marketing chief Michelle Peluso – fresh off a stint as CEO of Gilt Groupe – delivered the news in an internal video, telling US marketing staff it was "time for us to start bringing our teams together, more shoulder to shoulder."
Affected employees were given 30 days to either relocate to one of six "strategic" hubs (Armonk, Atlanta, Austin, Boston/Cambridge, New York, Raleigh, and San Francisco) or leave the company. Moving allowances were reportedly capped around $2,000, with no guaranteed cost-of-living adjustment. The mandate, initially concentrated in marketing, was later extended across IT, design, and the Software and Systems unit.
Leadership framed the mandate as a push for tighter collaboration and faster execution, with Peluso explicitly citing the need to compete with Microsoft and West Coast rivals.
Critics framed it as a stealth layoff dressed up as strategy, particularly given IBM's then-ongoing run of 22 consecutive quarters of declining year-over-year revenue (a streak that wouldn't break until Q4 2017). The company's badge system was used to enforce attendance, and a long-running internal joke that "IBM" stood for "I've Been Moved" took on fresh meaning.
That reversal hasn't softened with time. IBM extended return-to-office mandates after the Covid pandemic, and in January 2024 IBM Consulting ordered US executives and people managers back into corporate offices at least three days a week, with another 30-day relocation ultimatum for those living too far from a hub.
Why the other usual suspects don't quite fit:
- Yahoo is the most common wrong guess. Marissa Mayer's work-from-home ban in 2013 is famous, but Yahoo's remote program was modest in scale and short-lived compared to IBM's three-decade run.
- Hewlett-Packard experimented with flex-work arrangements in the US and Germany in the 1980s, but never approached IBM's scale, nor did they execute a high-profile reversal.
- Xerox ran early "virtual office" pilots in the 1970s and 80s through projects like the Electronic Work Station. It was another pioneering move, but it never scaled into a company-defining policy.
IBM's story is the one that checks every box. It's also a useful cautionary tale... the company that wrote the original remote-work playbook ultimately decided, after nearly 40 years, that it didn't want to follow it anymore.