For years, remote work was treated as a workaround — a policy exception layered onto an office-first organization. New benchmark data from the Virtual Association Network (VAN) “2026 Report of Survey Research Insights” suggest that era is over. Remote and hybrid work has become an operating model in its own right, and the associations getting the most out of it aren't just allowing remote work. They're rebuilding around it.

The findings, drawn from 156 association executives surveyed by VAN in partnership with Association Laboratory, point to a field that has moved well past experimentation and into architecture.

The Shift Is Structural, Not Superficial

The data make clear this isn't a temporary accommodation. Eighty-five percent of associations report that at least a quarter of their staff work remotely three or more days a week, and for nearly three-quarters of organizations, that arrangement has been in place for five to nine years. Remote staffing levels have grown by at least 50 percent since before the pandemic at an overwhelming majority of associations.

That kind of longevity changes the calculus. A policy adopted six years ago isn't an exception anymore—it's infrastructure, and it needs to be managed like infrastructure.

Redesigning, Not Just Allowing

The clearest signal in the data is that the most fully remote associations didn't simply permit remote work. They rebuilt their systems around it.

• Compensation. Fully remote organizations are far less likely to anchor pay to headquarters geography, gravitating instead toward national or role-based compensation models.
• Management. Their open-ended comments point to over-communication, explicit expectations, written documentation, and structured project management tools as the operating norm—not a workaround.
• Meetings. Rather than compensating for distance with more in-person time, fully remote associations lean into a structured virtual cadence: Weekly all-staff meetings are far more common among remote-first organizations than among hybrid peers, who rely more heavily on frequent in-person gatherings.
• Home-office investment. Fully remote organizations are substantially more likely to cover employee costs for computers, printers, and home internet—treating the home office as a genuine workplace rather than a stopgap.

Segmenting by organizational size sharpens the picture. Smaller associations run the most remote-first model, averaging roughly three-quarters of staff fully remote, compared with about half at organizations above $10 million in revenue. Larger organizations maintain broader in-person infrastructure, more formal leadership coordination, and a strong preference for bringing administrative functions in-house rather than outsourcing—a reversal of the pattern seen among smaller, leaner associations.

What This Means for Association Leaders

• Audit your policies, not just your permissions. If staff have been remote for years, treat compensation, management, and meeting structures as due for a redesign—not a patch.
• Match your model to your scale. Smaller organizations can move faster toward remote-first; larger organizations may need more formal coordination structures to manage complexity.
• Invest in the home office as real infrastructure. The data show a direct link between equipment investment and remote-work maturity.

The One Constant: Culture

Across every segment—regardless of size, budget, or how remote the workforce is—one challenge shows up consistently: building and sustaining culture. It's the top-cited struggle among fully remote and hybrid associations alike, suggesting it isn't a symptom of remote work done poorly, but a structural feature of distributed work itself—one that requires deliberate design rather than hope.

Remote work has moved from something associations tolerate to something they build. The organizations further along that path aren't waiting for headquarters to define how work happens. They're redesigning from the ground up.