Remote Work Leaves Hospitality Staff Behind: What Would Fairer Flexibility Look Like?

The Research paper asks readers to consider choice over work location, and alternatives for people without that choice, as part of decent work under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 8.

A hotel cannot send its housekeeping team home to clean rooms, and a restaurant cannot serve dinner through a laptop. For people do these jobs, the spread of remote work has created a practical question about what flexibility means when showing up is part of the job. Someone still needs to cook breakfast, welcome guests and clear tables, even as colleagues in office roles gain more choice over where they work.

Researcher Jens Thoemmes explores this divide in "Telework Agreements, Spatial Autonomy and Decent Work in the Hospitality Workforce," published in Social Sciences. His study examines French workplace agreements alongside official statistics from France, Germany and Europe, with Malaysian data providing additional context. The central concern is how employers and employee representatives treat workers whose jobs cannot travel home with them.

Hospitality has invested in digital tools, artificial intelligence and service robots, much of it focused on guests and daily operations. Those changes have not necessarily given employees greater control over their working lives, particularly in jobs already associated with low pay and insecurity. The paper asks readers to consider choice over work location, and alternatives for people without that choice, as part of decent work under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 8.

Similar Rules, Fewer People Who Can Benefit

The research examined 216 French company agreements signed between February 2018 and April 2026, divided equally between hospitality and other industries. Agreements were matched by signing year, and 179 contained an operative telework rule suitable for the main analysis. That left 92 hospitality agreements and 87 comparison agreements, covering rules about eligibility, approval and arrangements for excluded employees.

Around four in five agreements excluded the operational workforce through named job categories or tests of whether tasks could be performed remotely. The figures were 78.3% in hospitality and 81.6% in other industries, showing a broadly shared approach rather than a restriction unique to hotels and restaurants. Where agreements stated a weekly limit, the median was two remote-working days in both groups.

The difference lay in how many workers could realistically benefit from those rules. Nearly half of hospitality agreements were signed by entities in sectors where fewer than one-third of employees held technically teleworkable jobs, compared with 23% of comparison agreements. These estimates describe potential reach using sector-level employment patterns, so they do not reveal how many employees at an individual company actually received permission to work remotely.

What Happens to Staff Who Must Be There?

None of the 92 hospitality agreements offered a benefit explicitly because employees could not telework, and only two comparison agreements did so. The paper calls this approach "place-blind," meaning the rules admit suitable jobs without addressing what exclusion means for everyone else. Telework was also a relatively uncommon bargaining topic, appearing in 1.5% of deposited agreements across the five hospitality branches studied, against 5.1% across the wider database.

A detailed reading found no hospitality agreement that specifically made a named frontline role eligible or opened access to everyone in a workforce containing operational staff. Two agreements from one hospitality company permitted occasional remote work for unspecified operational functions, subject to service compatibility. This leaves some room for flexibility in mixed roles, where part of the job could be done elsewhere.

Some agreements included benefits for employees working on site, without explicitly linking them to exclusion from telework. Examples included pandemic attendance bonuses, staff rest areas and a Paris hotel's four-day week for reception and customer-relations teams. The distinction matters because finding no explicit compensating benefit in these agreements does not mean employers offered no support anywhere in their employment arrangements.

A Divide That Reaches Beyond Hospitality

French national figures show how strongly remote work follows occupational status. In 2023, about 65.4% of managers and professionals teleworked at least occasionally, compared with 10.6% of clerical and service employees and 0.8% of manual workers. The gap between managers and manual workers grew from roughly 28 percentage points in 2019 to 65 points in 2023.

Clerical, service and manual workers together accounted for 73% of French hospitality employees, placing much of the workforce in categories with limited remote-work access nationally. These are economy-wide occupational rates, and the study does not use them to calculate a hospitality telework rate. Germany offered a direct sector comparison: food and beverage services recorded 5.7% working from home in 2025, the lowest of 15 listed activities, against 24.6% overall and 74.4% in IT services.

Germany's food-service figure fell below earlier estimates of remote-work feasibility, including one suggesting 39% of jobs could be performed partly from home. Different years, populations and definitions prevent that gap from being treated as a precise measure of opportunity denied by employers. European figures also showed higher home-working participation in France than Germany in 2023, but differences in definitions mean workplace regulation cannot be credited with explaining the gap on this evidence alone.

Making Flexibility Meaningful for Everyone

For staff who must attend in person, the paper suggests predictable schedules, earlier notice of shifts, employee-controlled shift swaps, additional rest and transport support. Compressed working weeks and greater control over rotas could give employees more room to organise family responsibilities, travel and everyday life. These options require negotiation around the work itself, including whether mixed roles contain tasks that could occasionally move off site.

Recruitment and retention make these questions relevant to employers, with French hospitality businesses expecting half their planned hires in 2025 to be difficult and Germany identifying shortages in cooking and restaurant service occupations. Malaysian figures add context: hospitality employment and hours in 2025 exceeded 2019 levels by 19% and 16%, respectively, but output per hour remained 6% lower. Neither those figures nor the agreement analysis establishes that limited remote work causes staffing problems or lower productivity.

The study covers negotiated French agreements, excludes informal and individual arrangements, and matches comparison firms by year without matching their size. AI-assisted coding was checked by the researcher, with more uncertainty in finer classifications, and benefits contained in separate agreements could have been missed. Its finding concerns what these written rules provide; future research needs company workforce data, independent coding and employees' experiences to establish whether alternative flexibility improves satisfaction, recruitment or retention.