From Work-from-Home to Return-to-Office: A Theory-Anchored Reddit Study of Remote Work Discourse

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Original abstract

Remote work, also known as working from home (WFH), has deep roots in teleworking and telecommuting, enabled by advances in information and communication technologies (Allen et al., 2015). The COVID-19 pandemic transformed remote work from a selective arrangement into a large-scale redesign of work itself (Bick et al., 2023). Post-pandemic work has not returned to an office-only equilibrium; instead, hybrid and WFH arrangements, along with return-to-office (RTO) mandates, have become the norm. WFH has shifted from a peripheral HR perk to a core element of contemporary work design. Recent research has examined remote work in the COVID-19 pandemic context across various areas, including applicant diversity (Hsu & Tambe, 2025), status equalization (Hinds et al., 2026), and employee satisfaction and retention (Makridis & Schloetzer, 2026). Our study extends this research by examining how employees' interpretations of WFH, hybrid work, and RTO develop and evolve in online communities. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources (JDR) model and the Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Neglect (EVLN) framework, we investigate how employees make sense of changing remote work arrangements and how they experience these organizational shifts. We analyze WFH discourse on Reddit from 2015 to 2026 using a large-scale corpus of WFH/RTO-related text across work-related subreddits. Our methodology uses AI/LLM (Large Language Model)-enabled, theory-anchored discourse measurement to score Reddit text for job demands, job resources, burnout, EVLN-related responses, and fine-grained emotions. We then aggregate these scores across sentence, unit, account-month, subreddit-month, and event-centered WFH/RTO comparison levels. This approach enables a longitudinal view of public work discourse and collective sensemaking before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study makes several contributions. First, it extends remote-work research by shifting attention from formal organizational policies and outcomes to the collective sensemaking processes through which workers interpret and evaluate WFH, hybrid work, and RTO. Second, by integrating the JDR model with the EVLN framework, it offers a theoretically grounded account of how changing work arrangements are experienced as both resources and demands, and how those experiences are associated with different forms of employee response. Third, by leveraging a large-scale longitudinal social media corpus spanning over 10 years, the study provides a unique view of how remote-work discourse evolved across major institutional and societal shifts.

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