Over forty years ago, IBM set up an experiment. They installed terminals at five of their employees’ homes to understand work-from-home. Soon enough, it freed 58 million square feet and delivered $2 billion in savingsBy 2009, 40% of IBMers across the globe were working from their homes. In 2017, IBM reversed this strategy — it began calling back thousands of its remote workers in the US to work from the office “shoulder to shoulder”. Not just IBM. Marissa Mayer famously brought back remote workers at Yahoo in 2013. Bank of America did so in 2014.

Fast forward to 2020 and here we are: the pandemic has changed work forever. Working from home has become the new normal. When the entire tech world moved home, notable trends emerged – the most significant of them being the rise of tier 2/3 cities as viable locations for high-tech work. Whether it’s reverse migration to smaller towns in the US or Indian professionals returning to their hometowns, knowledge work post-2020 is bound to be more spread out.

Today, as we approach the end of 2021 and gear up for the ‘great hybrid experiment,’ one thing remains clear: whatever the future of work may be, multinationals will only expand their operations to these cities due to the increasing availability of talent.

Read More: Future of Work: How Tier 2/3 Cities will Drive the Next Technology Revolution