Why 40% of UK Workers Now Work Remotely, and Why Your IT Hasn't Caught Up

Remote work was supposed to be temporary. Six years on, it is simply how Britain works. The numbers are no longer a pandemic blip to wait out; they describe a permanent shift that most small and medium businesses have adapted to on the surface while leaving the foundations untouched. The setup hurriedly assembled in spring 2020, a VPN and a fleet of laptops, is still running in thousands of companies, and it has quietly become the thing holding them back.

This article lays out where remote work actually stands in the UK, why the 2020 fix made sense at the time, and why it is now the bottleneck rather than the solution. It then walks through the three gaps that old setup leaves behind, in productivity, security and onboarding, and how virtual desktops close them.

How Many UK Workers Are Remote Now?

More than most owners assume, and the figure has settled rather than faded. According to the ONS, 40% of UK workers were working remotely in 2025, made up of 14% who are fully remote and 26% who split their week between home and the office. This is not a fringe arrangement for a few staff. It is two in five of the workforce.

Britain is also near the front of the pack globally. Stanford University researchers found UK employees average 1.8 remote workdays per week, putting the UK top in Europe and second in the world behind Canada, against a global average of 1.3 days. Demand keeps climbing too, with searches for remote jobs up enormously over recent years. The point for a business owner is simple: remote and hybrid working is now the default expectation for a large share of the people you employ and the people you want to hire, and it is not going away.

Why Was the 2020 Fix Good Enough at the Time?

When offices closed almost overnight, the goal was survival, not elegance. Companies needed staff to reach their files and systems from home immediately, so they did the fastest thing available. They bought laptops, shipped them out, and set up a VPN, a virtual private network, which creates an encrypted tunnel from the home laptop back to the office network so the worker can reach internal systems as if they were sitting at their desk.

For an emergency, this was sensible. It used technology IT teams already understood, it got people working within days, and it carried everyone through the immediate crisis. The trouble is that the emergency ended and the emergency setup stayed. What was meant to last a few weeks is now load-bearing infrastructure for a permanent way of working, and it was never designed for that job.

Why Has That Setup Become the Bottleneck?

Because a VPN and a laptop solve only one problem, access, and remote work in 2026 demands far more than access. The model assumes everyone occasionally dials back into a central office. When that occasional connection becomes the everyday route for 40% of staff working most of the week from home, the cracks widen into the three gaps below.

The Productivity Gap: Why Does Everything Feel Slow?

A VPN funnels a remote worker's traffic back through the office before it goes anywhere. When the apps and data lived in the office, that made sense. Now that so much sits in the cloud, the traffic often takes a long detour: from the worker's home, down the tunnel to the office, back out to the cloud, and all the way back again. The result is the lag everyone recognises, the spinning wheel, the slow file that takes an age to open, the video call that stutters. Multiply a few wasted minutes across every task, every person, every day, and you have a meaningful drag on output that no one ever put on a balance sheet.

A virtual desktop removes the detour. The actual computer runs in a data centre next to the systems it talks to, so the heavy lifting happens where the data lives and only the screen image travels to the worker. The experience is fast regardless of where the person sits or how their home broadband is feeling that morning.

The Security Gap: What Happens When a Laptop Goes Missing?

The 2020 model scatters your company across hundreds of laptops in homes, cafes and trains, and every one of those laptops holds real company data on its hard drive. A lost or stolen device is then a potential data breach. The VPN itself is a blunt instrument too: once a laptop is connected, it often has broad access to the network, so a single compromised machine can become a way into everything. Keeping all those scattered laptops properly patched and updated is a constant, losing battle.

Virtual desktops invert this. Nothing sensitive is stored on the device in the worker's hands, because the data stays in the managed central environment. A lost laptop is then just lost hardware, not a lost database. If something does go wrong, recovery is far quicker because the desktops are controlled centrally and can be reset from a clean copy, a point we cover in our guide on how virtual desktops change ransomware recovery. The same central control keeps everything consistently up to date instead of relying on each remote worker to manage their own machine.

The Onboarding Gap: Why Does a New Starter Still Wait a Week?

Under the old model, every new remote hire means the same slow routine. Buy a laptop, wait for it to ship, build it, configure the VPN, post it out, and hope the new person can connect on day one. For a business hiring regularly or across the country, that delay repeats every single time and eats into the first week of everyone you bring on.

Virtual desktops turn that week into minutes. You prepare a standard desktop for each role once, then assign a new starter a ready-made copy and send them a sign-in link, and they are working from whatever device they already own. We go into the detail in our piece on onboarding a new hire in minutes with virtual desktops, and the same speed applies in reverse when someone leaves.

How Do Virtual Desktops Close the Gap?

The thread running through all three gaps is the same. The 2020 setup keeps the computer on the worker's lap and tries to stretch a connection back to the office. A virtual desktop moves the computer into a controlled central environment and sends only the picture of it to the worker. That single change is what fixes the lag, keeps the data off vulnerable devices, and makes setting up a new person a matter of minutes rather than a courier's timetable.

It also fits where the workforce is heading. With remote and hybrid working now normal and demand for it still rising, the businesses that will cope best are the ones whose infrastructure assumes people work from anywhere, rather than treating it as an exception bolted onto an office-era design. The ability to hire the right person regardless of location, which we look at in our article on solving the UK skills shortage with virtual desktops, depends on exactly this kind of setup.

Is It Time to Rethink Your Remote Setup?

If your remote working still rests on the laptops and VPN you stood up in 2020, it is worth asking an honest question. Is that setup helping your people work, or is it the reason things feel slow, the reason a lost laptop keeps you up at night, and the reason every new hire loses their first week? For a great many UK businesses the answer is uncomfortable, because the temporary fix became permanent without anyone deciding it should.

The good news is that the alternative is well established and no longer exotic. Virtual desktops were built for the way people actually work now, rather than the way they worked before 2020. Catching your IT up to your workforce is no longer a technical luxury. With 40% of the country working remotely, it is just keeping pace.