Songfacts®:

• The lead single from 7/27, this follows a similar theme of hard grind to Rihanna and Drake's 2016 single "Work." In fact, the girl group had to change the title after Rihanna released her tune. "Our song was originally called 'Work' and when Rihanna dropped, it was like, 'Hell no, can't have the same song as the queen,'" Fifth Harmony's Dinah Jane Hansen told Billboard magazine. "So we put in 'from home,' just added two words."
• Californian singer Ty Dolla $ign croons the third verse. "I'm so happy he agreed to be on this with us," said Dinah Jane. "He's definitely one of my favorite artists. Especially after his song 'Paranoid ' I was like, "Guys, we gotta get this dude on our song," and he was a perfect fit for this song. The way he rides it and brings a different feel to the song. He brought it."
  
  Ty is used to "work" - in 2014 he released a song with that title.
• The chorus is extremely repetitive, with the word "work" repeated seven times after each line:
  
  You don’t gotta go to work, work, work, work, work, work, work
  But you gotta put in work, work, work, work, work, work, work
  You don’t gotta go to work, work, work, work, work, work, work
  Let my body do the work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work
  
  Added to the "work from home" lines that follow, this makes 30 repetitions just in the chorus. With three choruses, plus a mention from Ty Dolla $ign in his verse ("girl go to work for me") and two more in the outro, that's a brain-invading 93 mentions of the word "work." Rihanna's "Work" mentions the word 79 times.
• The Fifth Harmony quartet were originally five singers who all successfully auditioned as soloists on the 2012 series of The X Factor, but failed to progress individually to the Judges' Houses stage of the competition. Simon Cowell decided that the individual contestants were too special to let go, so at the end of the show's Boot Camp week, the five girls became Fifth Harmony. The album title references the date in July 2012 that the girls were placed together to become a group.
• The construction-themed video was helmed by Director X - he also shot Rihanna and Drake's "Work" clip.
• This was the first Hot 100 Top 10 hit by a girl group in over seven years. The previous song to reach the top tier was The Pussycat Dolls' "When I Grow Up," which peaked at #9 back in 2008.
• The underlying beat in this song is a synthetic mallet effect. The following year, Ed Sheeran used something similar on his hit "Shape Of You."
• This won for Best Collaboration at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, and also Collaboration of the Year at the American Music Awards.
• The song reached #1 in Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, UK's Official R&B Chart and the US Mainstream Top 40.
• Daniel Bedingfield is a credited writer as the song borrows from the melody of his 2001 hit "Gotta Get Thru This."
• As concern over coronavirus escalated across America in March 2020, many were forced to "work from home." Four years after this song originally hit the charts, it returned to the upper regions of the US iTunes thanks to a flood of memes using it to soundtrack a self-quarantine.