Back in my day... working meant 8 to 5, five days a week, at a remote location. Some jobs had multiple shifts, but were generally done in place. As communications improved and more work was done with computers, the physical place you worked had less importance. During the COVID pandemic, businesses discovered many jobs could be done remotely just as well and the rules slacked a bit. Since my work is done on a computer, and I can attend meetings over Zoom, there has been no practical reason for me not to work at home, which gives me a lot of flexibility. This also gives workers much more flexibility; they may split their work hours into smaller chunks and be more productive and relaxed.
But that communication part, that was the killer. Let's go back to 1999, when I was the web administrator for the San Francisco Giants. Cell phones were still pretty expensive then, so many folks used pagers, which were a tiny device somebody could call and send you a phone number to call. Many a time I would get a page that the server was running slow or there were other technical issues. I would get a page, find a telephone, and get marching orders. In most of San Francisco the Ricochet network provided internet access. It was the size of a large phone and weighed a few pounds, and ran pretty slow (28K, then 128K in 1999). I would fire up my laptop and log in via Ricochet. There were many times I would be in the stands at Candlestick doing tweaks to the website in real time.
Nowadays we have powerful cell phones and very fast modems, and remote working can be as fast as the office.