The Wall Street Journal reports on the status of remote work these days:
Remote jobs made up 13.2% of postings advertised on LinkedIn last month—down from 20.6% in March. Other job sites such as Indeed.com and ZipRecruiter also report declines in remote listings.
....Companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Starbucks Corp., meanwhile, are stepping up the days that hybrid employees are required to come into the office. Ally Financial Inc., based in Detroit, stepped up its return-to-office policy in September, shifting from asking workers to come in at least part-time to expecting it. How many days depends on the job and department.
Lots of workers might like having remote jobs, but as near as I can tell bosses almost universally hate it. For that reason remote work is nearly certain to continue shrinking, and if the economy goes into recession later this year it's likely to plummet.¹ By the end of 2024, I predict that the share of workers who are remote will be only slightly higher than a pre-pandemic trendline would have suggested. Call it 9% or so.
¹Because workers will be more desperate for jobs, which will give employers the leverage to hire only people willing to work out of an office.
Unfortunately, for no good reason my boss demanded our return. Went to regional offices though so not too bad. Then they decided they wanted us all in the NYC office. After the uprising we are status quo at the regional offices.
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I also dream of being a ho bot like you.
On the flip side though, the talent that wants remote work will go to work for companies that offer it. If talent matters, bosses are going to have to give in.
Agreed. My area (IP licensing from universities) is pretty niche-y and requires an uncommon skill and experience set. Schools are clamoring for the handful of folks that meet their needs and many will hire them wherever they are (in the US).
Now that infrastructure (zoom everywhere) and customs (zoom instead of walking down the hall or driving across town) support remote work the new normal will definitely be a higher rate than previously.
It’s really awesome to go back into the office. In exchange for wasting an unpaid hour each way in traffic, I get to sit all by myself most days in my cube, and do zoom meetings with people who are still working remote. It’s super great to justify my employer’s insistence on maintaining expensive CBD office space, particularly when the internet or power or heat or whatever goes out, or someone in the building comes down with hospitalized Covid, and I have to work from home again for a few weeks with no apparent loss of personal productivity.
The Masters of the Universe sure do know what they’re doing all the time, don’t they?
Spot on.
Good comment. The senior level bosses early in my career usually displayed pretty good sense. As time went by they were usually replaced by people who knew nothing, didn't care, were BS artists, and came into the job already polishing the resume for the next.
Most of these guys were super extroverts and never happy if alone. Still they kept their grand offices while spending half a million to tear down 21 sheet-rock offices inhabited by engineers and replace them with 21 much smaller cubes. The total space occupied by the small cubes remained the same, but there were a lot more halls. Cubes are less flexible than 2x4s.
What we’re seeing around DC is that, as a result of remote work, office spaces are not being used to capacity, money is wasted on rent, and businesses started to accommodate workers in those buildings are suffering.
Click on Eve’s link. It’s our ticket out of there
Heh, +1
"as near as I can tell bosses almost universally hate it"
At my own company it's a mixed bag: some do and some don't. Generally speaking, contempt for remote work correlates with three things: skill in people management (with the more incompetent managers strongly preferring return-to-office), rank in the corporate hierarchy (the higher up they are, the more face time seems to matter to them), and function (e.g., Finance are the main advocates of return-to-office, IT its leading enemy).
"if the economy goes into recession later this year it's likely to plummet"
Maybe so. Thanks to the FMOC's institutional preference for the interests of rentiers over those of workers, the bargaining power of the latter will certainly suffer in the coming years. And workers as a class certainly prefer remote work, on average, far more than do managers, as a class.
That said, my company just let leases expire on two office locations, where the teams nominally tied to those locations had been remote effectively since the start of the pandemic, and they did this purely as a cost cutting measure. So we'll have to wait and see how the microeconomics of this plays out. Just maybe, as belts tighten, more CFOs will begin to take note of the monstrous waste of resources involved in indulging the insecurities of the highest status execs with the worst track record of hiring & retaining top talent...
Interesting - at the agency I work for our entire Comptroller division is full time remote though the Comptroller herself is in the office a lot and folks have to come in when working with classified stuff. Mostly we want to be remote and luckily management also wants us remote as they have a mandate to get rid of leased space and consolidate so I no longer have a cube at the building where I used to be in the office four days a week.
What about our devoted commenter Eve? I'm guessing she works remotely. Probably has no choice about it.
And here I felt pretty cynical thinking bosses and employers ultimately won't be able to give up the control over employees' time and interactions they get from having everybody in offices-- then I read responses upthread, wow.
Cynicism aside, though, if you're thinking about how an organization functions 5 or 10 years down the road, it's hard for me to see how most can opt for anything more than mild hybrid, like maybe a 4-day week. People retire, move, move on up; companies add new positions. How do you hire and train if it's remote? How do you get new hires integrated into work patterns? How do people build work relationships they'll need? Plus, people who were mostly educated in the before times are used to working in person in small groups-- it's what the education system has insisted on for what, 20 years?
So without discounting how venal and petty bosses and organizations can be, I think the long-term health of most organizations will really weigh against remote work.
“How do you hire and train if it's remote? How do you get new hires integrated into work patterns? How do people build work relationships they'll need?”
I don’t know but my company did it for 2.5 years from March 2020 to Nov 2022. Somehow it must be possible to hire and train people remotely, cause there have been at least a dozen new hires that I personally work with - but have never met face to face despite having to go into the office 3 days a week now! And none of them seem more incompetent or insecure that hires pre-2020 were. So somehow new hires do manage to assimilate into jobs even if everyone is working from home.
I think the opposite. The workers who can WFH prefer that. Given a choice between an employer who permits WFH and one that does not, many workers will choose the WFH job even if the pay is a bit lower. That means that WFH employers will tend to get the better workers. The long-term health of organizations not permitting WFH will suffer because they won't be able to recruit the best people.
I've been training new hires remotely for years now via skype and teams. Plus teams in at my Agency have daily stand up meetings and casual meetings where we have the conversations we used to have in the office. I think a lot of folks are discounting how well it can be done if it's done right. It is the future. The $$$$ works against wasting office space that is not needed. A lot of this, "Oh we're gonna return to the office talk" as wishful thinking for 2019.
I think you (and the WSJ) are seeing an illusion in the numbers. Most of the remote jobs posted are for jobs that were already popular for remote work: Tech and the tech-related jobs at non-tech companies.
I suggest looking at office vacancy rates, instead.
If you look at vacancy rates, most medium and large metropolitan areas saw increases in the office vacancy rate in Q4 2022, moving further away from pre-pandemic rates.
Consider that a lot of leases were signed during COVID, and the prevailing notion is that hybrid workplaces will be in place until those leases are up.
The reduction in remote work job postings on LinkedIn is interesting, but doesn't really tell us very much and certainly doesn't (by itself) support the guesstimate that remote work jobs are shrinking and will continue to shrink.
But it certainly does frame the situation in a certain way.
Ever since summer 2020, creating the sense that it's inevitable has become a thing in certain business media circles. A bit like the zombie idea that the debt is always about to destroy the economy because look at this one piece of data that doesn't really say what I want you to think it says.....
Agreed and I'll add that with a lot of the tech industry titans laying off, they are the same people who tended to have a lot of remote jobs. Once we get through this recession and the industry stabilizes more, the remote job listing will start to creep back up.
Tech is contracting at the moment as Tik Tok takes up all the oxygen and privacy policies around selling of personal data have cratered the value of advertising.
This is for posting on Linkedin, so it doesn't say what is happening with current employees. My sense is that many jobs that have gone remote are staying that way. Especially once highly valuable employees move out of state, getting them back in the office everyday can be real difficult. If your DBA has bought a house out of state, how much leverage does an employer have to bring them back.
Companies may also have hired people who live in parts distant with no sense they would need to relocate close to the office (and no arrangement to pay relocation). This was true where I work. I doubt those people will be told to relocate now.
That's nuts. I never teleworked (kind of by my own choice) prior to the pandemic, but had to from March 2020 through May 2022. We're hybrid now, but there are a lot of benefits to teleworking that I didn't recognize before. And, at least at my large employer, productivity didn't slack off one iota when we were in maximum telework.
Our productivity actually improved, since by being at home we could no longer be physically interrupted during the day by some random person wandering into our cube “just to chat” for upwards of 45 minutes a session.
Why do bosses hate it though? I've been working remote for close to 20 years and I'm a manager. My team is mostly in Atlanta and they are coming in to the office 2 days a week. I meet up with them at the office about two days a month. The rest of our company is scattered across the country. Everything is going fine. And we don't need as much office as we otherwise would so we save lots of money.
I was able to work remotely 2 days a week at my very first office job back in the mid 90s. I'm really amazed that bosses continue to resist remote work. As long as teams get together face-to-face a few times a year I don't see any downside.
Bad bosses hate it because they have to pay attention to subtlety and nuance in communication. It is more work for the boss to have to schedule time rather than stop by someone's desk on the way to grab another coffee.
Plus, bosses who manage by intimidation and threats are at a disadvantage over Zoom, where they can be recorded.
Shorter: bosses hate remote work because it's harder to hide their managerial shortcomings.
Insecurity. Bad bosses hate it when they don’t know what you’re doing for 8 hours a day + they hate to read stuff you email to them. like art eclectic wrote.
From the large employer point of view, I THINK (don't have third party data but have heard this from multiple sources) that on-boarding (getting a new employee integrated into a team and company culture) is VERY difficult in a remote work world. Further, managers find it more difficult to optimize a distributed work force.
In contrast, there are some jobs (IT for example) that have discrete tasks, that more easily support remote work. Further, with remote work an employer has a broader employment pool and potential wage arbitrage.
My point, Covid and new tools (Zoom etc) create new opportunities. I do not believe we have reached that new equilibrium that balances the changing work dynamic.
My company was fully remote for 2.5 years. Somehow we managed to hire at least a dozen new people that I directly work with (and probably hundreds more since my company employs 15,000 people). And none of them bitched at all about lack of face time. I’ve never met any of them face to face and yet my department has never been more productive. (We used to lose a lot of time to random people dropping by to shoot the shit when we were all in our cubes.)
Austin - I am not claiming that a primary or fully remote workforce can not succeed. Rather, I believe, many companies find it more difficult to integrate and manage a remote work force.
Perhaps, with time, better tools and management techniques will bridge the gap....
If remote work is a valid option for a company, why would they employ high-wage people in an adjacent expensive suburb (or a remote one) when they could hire people in India or (maybe) China who would work for much less?
Because when the next cultural revolution happens in China you'll be in a pickle. Heck a lot of companies outsourced IT work to Russia and Ukraine and Belarus. A buddy of mine worked for a company that was originally headquartered in Belarus and it had to scramble to evacuate employees in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine last year, also do the hard work of assuring clients that they were still fully functioning.
In my career sector US citizen is required heh, so no outsourcing.
It depends entirely on the industry and how big the company is. I can't imagine too many small companies would function well if they're all in one (or a few) locations with remote work but global companies were already moving this way. In my job, my direct reports are all over the globe and my other business partners are likewise scattered. I used to have to come into the office...but for no real reason. Once we pulled the Band-Aid off and went all remote, everyone (well nearly everyone) is happier and more productive.
Interesting to see ‘AI is still not here. But it’s getting damn close.’ and ‘Remote Work Continues to Shrink’ posts within 24 hrs…
Maybe a closer look at data sources on remote work, and more diverse sources would be helpful.
Some of the major health care providers in Northern CA are not sending their business side back to the office very much, lotta prime real estate office space sitting mostly empty.
Small businesses that can provide services virtually, at least in part, are not jumping back in to paying leases… for now, everyone I know prefers this. But then again, maybe these jobs will be fulfilled by AI sooner than others. Suppose AI may need a place to sit.