The Data Is In on Work From Home
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Are listeners more pro-remote or pro–return-to-office and why?
Are you team work from home, or are you team return to office? Last week, we asked you all to share your thoughts, and we got so many responses.
Hey there, journal. My name is Michael.
Hi, my name is Jane.
Hi, I'm CR, long-time listener, first-time caller, etc.
Some of you are very, very pro-remote work.
I have been working remotely for the past two years, and I love it. I can exercise. I can do my hobbies. You know, I can go and run an errand. I work probably 95% remotely, and I will say I think my work-life balance has never been better. If they ask me to go to an office, I will quit.
But for others, there's a lot to love about the office.
I am sick of fully remote work.
It bothered me not to have a consistent group of people that I went into the office and we worked together and we were a team.
Sometimes I kind of wonder, how would my life be if I were to work in office? Would I get more exposure? Would I be able to get promoted quicker? Would people truly see my value? Sometimes when you're working remotely, it can feel like you're shouting into the void.
But more than six years into this massive upheaval, what do we know about this big, accidental remote work experiment? Is it good? Bad? Somewhere in between? How has it reshaped the economy, businesses, and our work lives? From The Journal, this is Work Mode, a special series airing on Sundays where we take a look at how work is changing. I'm Jessica Mendoza. Let's get to work. To understand the aftershocks of the remote work revolution, I called up a colleague.
My name is Owen Tucker-Smith. I'm a reporter here. I cover the U.S. economy and all of its facets.
Owen is 24 years old, so he's kind of a remote work native.
So I am Gen Z, solidly Gen Z, and I graduated from high school in the spring of 2020, which, as we can all recall, was a moment.
Really in there.
Yeah.
I began college online. My first full year of college was remote classes. So before I really had any strong opinions about remote work, I had, you know, experienced remote school, which I think sort of shaped my early views about it. And so nowadays, you know, I primarily work from the office, but we do have kind of a hybrid bottle here.
I asked Owen to break down some of the latest research on remote work. What is the general picture that the data on work from home paints?
The general picture is that it has led to a massive shift. So first of all, it has shown that, you know, even six years after the pandemic, remote work has become a new normal. People are still working from home a lot. And it also shows that people really like to do that. When you look at, you know, the number of days that people work and how many of them are done at home, that number is around, you know, 26%. And so it's still more than a quarter of our hours worked, our remote hours. And when none of us convened the office, that number was very high.
Over 60%, according to Labor Department statistics.
And as people started doing return to office mandates, it dropped. But then the interesting thing is it sort of stopped dropping. Over the last few years, it has sort of seemed to reach something that almost looks like a floor that we aren't going below, which sort of suggests that remote work has become this kind of staple of the workplace for years to come, unless there's a big change.
Right, it kind of hit an equilibrium kind of thing. It's like, this is where we're at, about a quarter.
Exactly.
Still, a lot of corporate America is pushing for a return to office policy. Meta, Amazon, Fidelity, Target, Home Depot, among many others, have all required their workers to be three or more days back in the office. One of the biggest proponents of returning to the office has been Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
Here's why it doesn't work in our business. That's Diamond speaking at Stanford University last year. As a management tool, when we meet in the morning, you know, we talk, we have these debates. All day long we're talking. Hey, no, I checked on that. You're right about that. Here's what I think we should do.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Are listeners more pro-remote or pro–return-to-office and why?
0:09–7:39
2
How did the hosts introduce the scope of remote work six years after the pandemic?
7:39–12:01
3
Who is Owen Tucker-Smith and why does his perspective matter on remote work data?
12:01–17:46
4
What do the data say about how many workdays are still done from home?
17:46–23:07