Five years ago today, as rumours of France’s imminent border closure ricocheted across social media, I made a split-second decision that would inadvertently become a case study in remote work effectiveness.

The mad dash from Somerset to Narbonne wasn’t in any project plan. With nothing but a hastily packed bag and laptop, I crossed the Channel just hours before the French government sealed their borders at midnight.

My husband was already at our house in France with our dogs, and the prospect of indefinite separation wasn’t something I was willing to accept, pandemic or not.

Thankfully, my boss understood that humans occasionally have messy lives that don’t fit neatly into organisational charts. Their response? “Just make sure the work gets done.”

And it did. From my makeshift office in France, I continued leading the development of two counter-fraud tools for government Covid-19 grants. These weren’t minor projects; they became what Downing Street later called “star performers in the government’s Covid-19 response”.

So when I hear the now-fashionable criticism that remote work is somehow fundamentally flawed – less productive, less collaborative, less everything – I can’t help but see it for what it is: convenient fiction that ignores evidence.

The pandemic forced an unexpected experiment in distributed working at unprecedented scale. Many of us delivered the most crucial work of our careers during this period, not despite being remote but in some cases because of it.

Free from the tyranny of pointless meetings and workplace distractions, some discovered deeper focus and greater output.

The real lesson isn’t that offices are obsolete or that remote work is universally superior. It’s that flexibility serves both people and organisations when it’s built on trust and measured by outcomes rather than presence.

Five years on, as companies drag people back to desks under dubious pretences, I can’t help but wonder how quickly we forget what actual evidence has shown us. The work stands for itself. Those counter-fraud tools worked. The outcomes were delivered. And not a single commute was required.

Perhaps the most productive question isn’t whether remote work “works”. We’ve answered that. The real question is why some leaders remain so uncomfortable with what we learned.