Working from home did not arrive
in 2020. It had been waiting fifty years.

The idea of working from home is older than most of the people doing it. It was studied seriously in the early 1970s, it was technically possible in accounting practices well before 2020, and it was refused for decades on grounds that had almost nothing to do with technology. Then COVID-19 settled it in a fortnight. Understanding how we got here explains something useful about where most firms have ended up: running an arrangement nobody ever actually decided on.

We have been asking accounting practices about themselves for more than fifty years — charge rates, salaries, fees, staffing, profitability. In all that time nobody thought to ask where the work was being done, because there was only ever one answer.

Accounting was, for most of its history, one of the most place-bound occupations in the country. The work lived where the paper lived. Ledgers, working papers, the client's shoebox of dockets, the signed return that had to be physically posted. You could not take the file home because the file was three lever-arch folders and the partner needed it on Thursday.

That is the part worth remembering when someone describes flexible work as a recent idea. It is not. The idea was sitting there, fully formed, for half a century. What was missing first was the technology, and then, for a surprisingly long time afterwards, the willingness.

In the early 1970s, in the middle of the oil crisis, a research team at the University of Southern California led by Jack Nilles asked whether an organisation could move its information instead of moving its people. Nilles gave the practice its name: telecommuting. The trial was not quite working from the spare bedroom as we would understand it — employees of a Los Angeles insurance company worked from satellite offices closer to where they lived rather than commuting to one central building. The team published in 1976, concluding that decentralised work would soon be the cheaper option.

The trial worked. The insurance company did not continue with it once the research project ended.

That is the part worth sitting with. Nilles concluded afterwards that technology was not the limiting factor on adoption. Management acceptance was. Chief executives did not believe people would work properly where they could not be seen, and no amount of engineering addressed that. Any practice owner will recognise the concern, because it has not changed in fifty years.

For accounting firms there was a second, more literal obstacle, and it lasted much longer. You cannot decentralise a business whose raw material is paper held in one room. The profession's move out of the office did not begin with a decision about flexibility. It began, quietly and for entirely unrelated reasons, with the disappearance of the paper.

Electronic lodgement reached tax agents in the early 1990s, and by 1994 the Tax Office had extended it to companies, superannuation funds and people preparing their own returns. The compliance relationship moved onto a screen. Cloud accounting moved the client's file off the practice server and onto something any authorised person could open from anywhere — Xero was founded in 2006, and the rest of the market followed. Single Touch Payroll then made real-time digital reporting compulsory: from 1 July 2018 for employers with 20 or more employees, and from 1 July 2019 for everyone else. Client portals and digital signatures removed most of what was left.

By the end of 2019, the average Australian accounting practice could technically have run most of its work from anywhere. Very little of it did. The capability arrived years before the habit, which is exactly what Nilles had predicted in 1976. What was still missing was a reason compelling enough to override fifty years of management instinct, and it arrived within three months.

When the COVID-19 lockdowns arrived in March 2020, firms did in a weekend what they had declined to do for twenty years. Laptops went home. Monitors went into the boots of cars. Somebody worked out the VPN on a Sunday night.

Notice what actually caused that. Not a strategic review, not a competitor, not a persuasive staff member. A public health order. The objection that had held since the 1970s — that people will not work properly unless you can see them — was never answered. It was suspended, because for a period there was no lawful alternative.

And here is the part that matters commercially, six years on. Almost nobody wrote a policy. They wrote an email. It said something like: we are all working from home until further notice, please stay in touch, look after yourselves. That was the right message for that week, and I would have sent the same one.

But the emergency ended and the arrangement did not. What began as a temporary instruction became, in a great many firms, the permanent operating model — without ever being reviewed, re-decided or written down. Nobody sat in a partners' meeting and resolved to move to a hybrid practice. The practice simply never went all the way back.

For Australian accounting practices, an accounting firm working from home policy stopped being a nicety on 6 June 2023. That is when changes to the Fair Work Act made the right to request flexible working genuinely enforceable. An employer now has 21 days to respond in writing, must genuinely try to reach agreement, and may only refuse on reasonable business grounds it sets out. If it gets that wrong, the Fair Work Commission can conciliate the dispute and, if it is not resolved, arbitrate it.

The encouraging part, for practice owners, is what the Commission has accepted as reasonable business grounds. In Charles Gregory v Maxxia Pty Ltd [2023] FWC 2768, an employee sought to work fully from home. The Commissioner upheld the employer's refusal, accepting grounds that included productivity and supervision, face-to-face interaction, and learning opportunities for junior team members.

Read that list again, because it is almost word for word what accountants say when they explain why they want people in the office. The concerns the profession has been expressing since 2020 are not sentimental.

One caution, though, and it is important. That decision is not a formula. Reasonable business grounds depend on the circumstances of the particular case, and naming productivity or supervision is not the same as demonstrating either. What made the employer's position defensible was that it could explain its reasoning, support it, and show that it applied the same approach across the team.

It also had written hybrid working guidelines and had considered alternatives before refusing. There is a considerable difference between that and drafting a policy for the first time after a dispute has already arrived. A firm running on precedent and goodwill has nothing on paper, and finds out in the week it most needs it.

Fifty years of argument, two decades of quiet technical change, a pandemic that forced the issue in a fortnight, and a legal framework that arrived afterwards. That is the whole story, and it ends in the same place for most firms: with an arrangement that works well enough, that nobody formally chose, and that very few practices have examined since.

In our 2026 benchmark, 82 per cent of the 66 practices surveyed had flexible arrangements in place. Roughly half of them had never put those arrangements in writing. And in a profession that bills client work in six-minute units and benchmarks itself on charge rates, recovery and productivity percentages, exactly two practices out of the 54 with arrangements could point to a productivity gain from the biggest change to working life in a generation.

The practices that have written their arrangements down are, in my experience, the least anxious about them. One of them offered a warning about how to do it that I thought was worth more than most of the policies I have read.

I am not going to tell you that means flexible work has failed. It plainly has not, and the practices in that survey are not fools — they have bought staff goodwill at a price they consider worth paying. My concern is narrower. Most of them do not know what the price is.

That is the opportunity, and it is not the one people expect. Not to abolish flexible work. Not necessarily to expand it. To decide it, properly, once.

If your arrangement is already written down, reviewed this year, and you can show me what it has done to your numbers, you do not need our benchmark and you certainly do not need me. You have done the work. On the evidence of this survey, not many practices can say all three.