In 2020, amid COVID-fueled lockdowns, many industries had a choice: pivot to remote work or shutter altogether. In the wake of this, many businesses embraced remote work to stay afloat through several turbulent months. This brought the value of digital work to the forefront like never before and highlighted further how unnecessary it was for workers across many fields to be physically present in an office building to work in this new age of technology.
As a result, for several years after COVID, many businesses continued to allow workers to work remotely, much to the joy of numerous employees worldwide. However, what at the time seemed like a foundational shift in the workplace has since begun to be whittled away. Big corporations are forcing employees back to offices in record numbers.
Fortunately, Insightful.io and its founder, Ivan Petrovic, are leading the fight to keep work flexible. They show remote teams can still thrive and outperform traditional models with the right tools.
Remote Work Decline
Despite remote ranking atop workers’ preferences, remote work opportunities have declined rapidly. Remote job postings have fallen sharply (from 46% in 2020 to 26% in 2025), with major corporations (Amazon, JPMorgan, Dell, Salesforce, AT&T) mandating office returns for established employees. Insightful isn’t alone in its crusade to enable more remote work.
Major companies like Airbnb and Dropbox have recently issued declarations in favor of remote work. However, the team at Insightful believes that undoing all the progress made in this area would be the wrong move. As such, they are in charge of countering return-to-office (RTO) mandates and maintaining remote work.
Insightful.io is putting itself on the frontline as a champion of remote work. Up against RTO mandates from some of America’s largest corporations, some may say it’s an uphill battle. However, insightful CEO Ivan Petrovic sees things differently. In his mind, continuing the great remote work experiment is ultimately best for companies and employees alike.
The Difficulties of Remote Work
Industrial institutions’ traditional systems were not engineered with remote work in mind. As such, industries were forced to embrace new protocols and systems after the 2020 pandemic to keep up with drastically evolving times. However, the years since then have demonstrated an increasingly waning interest in making any of those changes last long term.
The reluctance to allow remote work typically stems from a lack of understanding and visibility of what employees are up to throughout the day. For some managers, there is the constant suspicion that employees are watching Netflix or doing laundry when they should be working. Managers faced the task of managing and monitoring employee performance without relying on traditional metrics. Often, employees are working, but managers can’t see it. This can lead to unfounded suspicions that aren’t good for employees or employers.
How Insightful Solves the Problem
Remote work is a good objective on many fronts. The flexibility isn’t just saving people from commuting. It’s allowing people to work flexible hours to look after kids and work around other family duties. For many, remote work and flexible hours are the ultimate solution for combining a busy personal life and work. Recent studies have found that 40% of employees would take a pay cut to stay remote; 60% say they’d leave their job if remote work were removed.
To this end, Insightful aims to foster trust in remote work among employers, thereby enabling more opportunities for remote work. It provides employers with this certainty, allowing remote work to continue. Founded in 2016, Insightful now has over 210,000 users, 5,800 clients, and a hundred employees. In this way, the brand strongly advocates for flexible work models.
Furthermore, using AI-guided management, Insightful helps leaders make smarter, data-driven decisions and manage distributed teams at scale.
Bigger Picture
Insightful aims to reverse the decline of remote opportunities and set a new standard for modern workforce management. By equipping companies and employees with the tools they need to maintain communication, transparency, and authenticity in their work, Ivan Petrovic and his team aim to foster a newfound appreciation for remote work among large corporations and demonstrate its effectiveness as a work mode.
