The number of full workdays in the U.S. that people worked from home rose from about 6% before the pandemic to more than 50% by the spring of 2020. Since then, it has slowly gone down and has been around 28% since the beginning of 2023. Many business leaders think it's time to go back to the office. For example, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, has said he doesn't believe in working from home.
Mark Zuckerberg has said that engineers "get more done" in the office
and Google's chief people officer recently told employees that attendance at work would be taken into account when they are evaluated. Even the people in charge at Zoom want workers to come in person twice a week What's the matter? Not even the top managers think this push to get people back to work will work. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, the University of Chicago, and Stanford all work together to run the Survey of Business Uncertainty. Every month, it polls senior executives at about 500 U.S. companies in a wide range of fields and regions. Since July 2023, when the most recent poll was done, it asks: "Think ahead to 2028. What percentage of your company's full-time workers do you think will be in each of these three groups: fully in person, hybrid, and fully remote?" Executives think that both fully remote and hybrid work will continue to grow, as shown in the picture below. The bosses don't think things will go back to how they were before the plague. In a survey, people were asked to rate how many of their full-time workers are (or will be) fully in person, fully hybrid, or fully virtual/remote in the years 2018, 2023, and 2028. This bar chart shows the results.Fully on-site and in person: 91.6% in 2018, 75.7% in 2023, and 72.6% in 2028....<br />The hybrid rate will be 4.1% in 2018, 14.1% in 2023, and 16.3% in 2028.<br />4.3% in 2018, 10.2% in 2023, and 11.2% in 2028 that work from home or are fully virtual.Survey of Business Uncertainty is the source.<br /> In Data & Visuals, you can find more HBR charts.
Four reasons show that they are right to think that remote and mixed work will grow
First, the number of people who work from home grows as technology for doing so gets better. In the 1960s, businesses used paper for everything, and it was hard to work from home. In the 1980s, personal computers became more common and it became easier to work from home. By the 2000s, the web and early video calls had made it even easier. It made sense from an economic point of view: as the "costs" of working from home went down (for example, by making it less inconvenient), more people decided to do it. Rates of working from home slowly rose over the 50 years before the pandemic, though they started out very low. This trend will keep going: Because of the pandemic, a lot more study and patenting was done on technologies that allow people to talk to each other from far away. Second, more people will work from home because companies that started after the pandemic are more likely to do so. As these newer businesses grow, the number of jobs that let you work from home will rise. Third, and this may seem the least clear, the U.S. is a good place to work from home. Already, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of working from home of any country we looked at, third only to New Zealand and fourth only to Canada. That makes sense. People who work from home have more freedom over how and when they work, which is a form of decentralization and personal liberty. Management experts have known for a long time that a company needs to be very well run for autonomous decision making to work. A separate study by one of our coworkers has found that, on average, U.S. companies have better management than companies in other countries. These better methods help U.S. companies handle remote work better. It also helps that American homes are bigger, which makes it easy to set up a workspace at home.
Lastly, more people will work from home because they like it
According to the evidence, workers value working from home about the same as getting an 8% pay raise. One recent, big study found that it cuts turnover by as much as 35%. It's a great perk. What about fears that working from home makes people less productive? According to research, working from home all the time is up to 10% less effective than working in the office. But it's also a lot cheaper because you don't need as much room and you can hire people from anywhere. In mixed mode, productivity varies by job, by person, and by how the business is run. On the whole, though, hybrid work doesn't seem to have much of an effect on output and may even make it go up. People who live in hybrid arrangements also save time and money by not having to drive to work. Employees are spending their time more successfully in the hybrid arrangement if they get the same amount of work done whether they drive to work two or five days a week. Leaders and companies should really think about the benefits of letting people work from home at least a few days a week. If all teams get together in the office on the same day or two every week, it might be the best of both worlds. Companies can make money, workers may like it, and it's better for the environment because it uses less energy.It's still not clear how much people will work from home in the future, but it's not likely that people will go back to the office in large numbers. The tools used for working from home will only get better, and workers will choose to work for companies with more flexible rules. The biggest sign that the push to get people back to the office won't work, though, is that executives secretly think more and more people will work from home.
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