This recent piece from Axios makes the case that company leadership have now joined investors and workers in relegating to the past the traditional full-time in office work schedule that has defined corporate operations for nearly 100 years.
According to the article, fewer than 4% of the 158 CEOs of US companies that were surveyed indicated that bringing more workers back to onsite work was on their agenda in 2024.
Continuing with the hybrid-work schedules they already have in place, however, is the plan for more than 1 out of 4 of those CEO respondents (27%) while an even greater proportion of US CFO respondents (65%) indicated that it is their understanding that hybrid work arrangements would remain available at their companies in the year ahead.
Recent estimates from Goldman Sachs indicate that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 employees (20% - 25%) in the US currently work at least part of the week every week at home instead of a worksite of one form or another,
Although the proportion of employees working from home has certainly decreased from its high water mark during the peak of the pandemic, at which point about 47% of the US workforce was spending at least some of their time on the clock working off-site, only about 3% of US workers had this kind of work arrangement prior to the onset of the pandemic, which is a good benchmark to look when evaluating just how dramatic this change has been over a relatively short time period.
Further, those numbers seem to indicate that about half of the jobs that went hybrid during the pandemic have stayed that way, and many thought leaders in the field believe that those changes aren't likely to revert any time soon.
For example, one confounder of a think tank that focuses on the future of work believes that the the flashy headlines highlighting big business leaders pushing for a return to in-person work are really just outliers that are outnumbered by the majority of company leaders who have realized the fight to bring workers back on-site does more harm than good.
Even companies run by outspoken proponents of full-time on-site work like Jamie Dimon continue to offer hybrid policies - 3 days in-office per week for most office workers excluding senior bankers in the case of JPMorgan Chase.
The battle may be over, as one member of the Conference Board’s leadership team put it, but what remains to be seen is whether some of the CEOs who pushed back hardest in the past will pick the fight back up again in the event that the labor market continues softening and leverage shifts back to employers to such a degree as to cross some undefined tipping point.
In the meantime, if the war continues in any form, it’s a cold war because hybrid and remote work arrangements have proven sturdier than most leaders were expecting, and the more ingrained and widespread that flexible work arrangements become, the bigger the fight will be the next time someone tries to put those opportunities back on the chopping block.
You can read more about this topic here.
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