Work from home levels seem to have hit an equilibrium at around 28% of hours worked in the US, though several factors indicate that number will probably climb in the next couple of years.
The percentage of days that Americans worked from home in a given month unsurprisingly peaked in the late spring of 2020 at about 61%, but that number quickly fell to about 37% by the end of the year.
The drop wasn’t so precipitous in 2021 but the trend continued just the same, with the percentage of days worked from home by US workers dropping from 37% to about 33%. Similarly, that percentage fell from about 33% to about 29% throughout 2022%.
Throughout 2023, however, that rate has essentially held stable, only fluctuating a point or two around the average, which led one Stanford economist to declare that “Return to the Office is dead.”
A separate set of data from Kastle indicates that occupancy rates in office buildings across the 10 largest US metro areas have similarly flatlined at around 50% and are showing no signs of movement at the moment, which further supports the entrenchment of work-from-home across a large swath of American business and life.
It’s worth noting that the 28% of hours worked remotely in November of 2023 does not mean that 28% of workers are full-time remote, of course. In actuality, just under 20% of workers are full-time remote as of October 2023, while about 34% work exclusively on-site, and nearly half (47%) of all workers are on some sort of hybrid schedule, for which there is a significant amount of parity among the various primary hybrid schedule options according to one recent survey, with:
It’s also worth noting that only about 1 in 5 of employees who work a hybrid-schedule have complete discretion about which of the days of the week they come in to the office.
Despite the preponderance of remote and hybrid roles, however, only about 11% of job postings currently advertise the at- least-partially-off-site nature of the role. Still, those figures represent a nearly 4 fold increase above the number of job listings that advertised remote/hybrid schedules prior to the onset of the pandemic, so the trend is clearly moving toward promoting off-site work as a desirable characteristic or perk of a job.
In fact, one survey from 2021 concluded that employees valued the opportunity to work from home as equivalent to an 8% pay raise, so employees have long been aware of the meaningful decrease in expenditures and/or increase in quality of life that working from home can afford, and given the additional entrenchment that has occurred in the years since, working from home may very well be perceived as even more meaningful and valuable today.
Employees aren’t the only ones who benefit from these arrangements, of course, with employers bringing in significant savings as a result of reduced expenses from office space/supplies to commuter subsidies and on-site perks, etc.
According to at least one economist, however, the greatest advantage that most employers have gained through the adoption of hybrid and remote work is increased employee retention, which has been especially crucial in navigating the tight labor market that has defined the last couple of years.
While a softening of the labor market certainly could lead to some correlated softening in the remote/hybrid work market - and it will be interesting to see to what degree hybrid and/or remote workers are disadvantaged when it comes to workforce reductions - the firmly established foothold that remote work has achieved is unlikely to slip in the absence of a sufficiently disruptive event that goes beyond mild recession.
For the time being and for the foreseeable future, remote and hybrid work don’t appear to be going anywhere.
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