The Wall Street Journal says real estate data shows that more people are returning to the office:
According to a September report by Redfin, about 10% of home sellers in the U.S. are looking to move because of return-to-work policies, indicating that after more than three years of remote-work policies dominating behavior in the housing market, the in-person, 9-to-5 lifestyle is picking up some steam. Average office attendance last week was 50.5% of the prepandemic level in February 2020 across 10 major U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, according to Kastle, which tracks security-badge swipes into the buildings they secure.
I'd like to believe this. I've thought for a long time that remote work would return to the old normal once COVID-19 was behind us. And it still might. These things often take longer to happen than you'd think.
That said, there's really no evidence of it yet. Average office attendance plummeted to around 20% when the pandemic hit, and then steadily rose to 50% by the end of 2022.
And then it stalled. For the past year it's been stuck at 50%. Likewise, in the Census Bureau's Pulse survey, at the height of the pandemic 36% of workers said they worked remotely at least part of the time. At the end of 2022 that was down to 26%. By November the number was.......28%.
This year just hasn't seen any change in remote work. It's plateaued at a significantly higher level than 2019. Maybe that will change whenever we next have a recession, but that's just speculation. To my surprise, it seems to be here to stay.
COVID *isn't* behind us yet, that's the flaw in your thinking.
But it is behind us. We are no longer at risk of overflowing available hospital beds. COVID is now less dangerous than flu (to the overall population, not to individuals who become ill).
Maybe they were also working that way in the past, they just didn't think it was a big deal.
Even if the exact same questions are being asked by pollsters 5 years ago and now, what people think of as an appropriate answer might have changed. Back when I "worked" in an office, I'd alternate between working at home or walking to the office, somewhat randomly depending on things like whether I had to attend a meeting, or I was in the zone at home and wanted to just finish up what I was doing on my home machine where everything was already set up.
If I'd been asked pre-covid, I'd probably have said "I work in an office"; if asked post-covid I might have appreciated, in a way that was not true pre-covid, that what the pollster wanted was NOT something like "are you self-employed" vs "are you an employee" but was more something like "conditional on you being an employee, do you regularly attend an office".
Maybe they were also working that way in the past, they just didn't think it was a big deal.
We have data on office vacancy. The trend isn't imaginary.
Well, I'm glad you're acknowledging that you were wrong, at least. Now get off of the "remote work is less productive, we must make everyone else return to the office" narrative, too.
There is no reason that people's effective hours per week must be maintained. If people get the same pay for fewer actual hours of work, not to mention commuting time, that is to their benefit. The standard work week has been the same since 1940 and it's about time it went down in one way or another. It's not as if profits have been squeezed as office workers stayed at home.
But why does Kevin think that workers should be returning - why aren't they being replaced by robots? If AI is as important and productive as he thinks it is, employers should be glad to get rid of the inefficient humans.
It's the commuting.
It’s pointless to sit in traffic commuting just so you can sit at a desk and do exactly the same stuff you were doing from home for 1-3 years. A lot of workers have realized this and are quietly rebelling as much as they can. If the official policy is “come in 3 days a week,” they come in from 10-2 on Tue, Wed and Thu and work from home the rest of the time. It’s really bullshit to force people to commute into work if (1) there is no measurable improvement in productivity from doing so, (2) commute costs are uncompensated and (3) they were happy to work from home. Some people are exttroverts and/or have children or spouses they hate being home with all day long, and those people can continue to go into the office. But why should everyone suffer just so those people can be happy?
Happy Thanksgiving, Kevin. I live in the suburbs of NYC and work in Manhattan in the finance industry. I can tell you two things: 1) that description covers way more people at way more levels of income and influence than you might realize and b) there is a meaningful percentage of us, I'd guess at least 30%, who will NEVER go back to working 5 days a week in the office. There is simply no need for it for many, many "office workers".
Agreed! Before the pandemic I worked from home three days a week. I'm fully remote now (about 2,000 miles from my employer). While I can understand why some office workers may need to go into the office some of the time, there are almost no office workers who need to go into the office all of the time. Good companies can motivate and keep people accountable regardless of where people work. Bad companies can't motivate people or hold them accountable even if they are in the office five days a week. I understand that some people like to come into the office. But the amount of tools that exist now to help people interact virtually is significant and only growing. These tools are cheaper than office space. So there are going to be alot of people working from home going forward.
Why? I'm curious as to why you believe white collar workers should be forced back to the office.
I'm not saying it is an unmitigated good, in particular mentoring is harder. But I do see many more positives than negatives.
"mentoring is harder"
I find it hard to understand how mentoring people in Bangalore is harder when I'm not at the office in Sunnyvale.
I'm curious as to why you believe white collar workers should be forced back to the office.
Where did you get the "should" from Kevin's words? He acknowledges he thought WFH would diminish more than it has. Nowhere does he indicate he believes workers "should" be "forced" to return to on site employment.
At google...
Before the pandemic, there was no official remote work policy. Now there is an official policy of "be in the office at least two days a week". Perhaps encouraging increased remote work. Also, it's no longer the case that everyone has their own desk. Which also encourages remote work.
Taken together, 50% of pre-pandemic levels sounds about right.
If everyone no longer has their own desk what did they do with the desks?
"Hoteling," which many companies are adopting, where office space and/or desks are shared and made available to whoever comes in, not assigned to specific employees any longer.
In my experience there is a very clear generational divide at play. Every year the people most uncomfortable with working from home and the most likely to imagine that we are missing something being away from the office will retire and be replaced with someone who is much more enthusiastic about it.
Anecdotally, new firms with few people but higher growth potential are embracing the work from home opportunity while larger, older companies who are slowly dying are not embracing the opportunity.
The amount of people going into the office in the US is never going back to what it used to be.
I think this is completely wrong. You're only seeing this from the POV that employers want to force workers back into the office and a recession gives them leverage.
As I mentioned before, WFH gives employers the ability to downsize their leased space. Once they've downsized their leased space, they have all the flexibility they need to rapidly respond to changes to the economy, whether booming or shrinking.
When it comes time to downsize their workforce, employers will filter out the WFH poor performers and increase their total workforce productivity without having to pull employees back into the office.
As a bonus, it's a lot harder to get away with sexual harassment remotely, as it likely leaves a documented trail of evidence.
WFH isn't going away despite what CEOs think. There will be legit demands for some jobs to be classified as hybrid where a well managed office will benefit from one day a week in person but a lot of the return to the office is forced harassment from clueless management who wants the old days when they could micromanage staff. The forced return to the office is backfiring for many organizations. A sibling was forced to return to the office 2 days a week but for farcical reasons the job didn't need in person time and she spends at least one of the days alone in her old office. The turnover for the org has been very bad as they pay non-profit salary scale and management is only gotten more toxic. They had HR to listening groups and surveys but they too were farcical the listening groups did not promise to protect employee identity and the survey was about what to do with the office space to make it more friendly - apparently renting out space to a coffee shop was the top choice amongst some bad choices. My other sibling was forced to return to the office to get laid off a week later. UGH.
Kudos to Kevin for going out of his way to acknowledge that the data in this instance is at odds, not only with a WSJ piece (hardly shocking, that), but also with his own expectations.
I can only say that I am much less surprised, based on mere personal experience, that back-to-the-office has stalled. The new reality is so pervasive that it's become as common to kick off conversations with new business associates by asking "Are you fully remote?" or "Do you get to the office much?" as it would formally have been to ask, "Where [which office location] are you based out of?" or "How do you like working in [office location]?" One simply no longer assumes that one's interlocutor is commuting full time to a formal office.
This is the new reality even in businesses where in-person work would have been considered the strong norm previously, and remote work a sort of special exception/reward.
I think this may have been harder to see coming if you did not directly experience the radical novelty of whole teams finding out, by necessity, that they could be high functioning without being in-person (with all that entails--including the long commutes, the rigid schedules driven by face time expectations rather than functional need, etc.).
That was quite a drastic bit of forced social learning, and it changed expectations in a commensurately drastic way. And it's actually quite hard to predict how long "these things" will take when there are no real precedents to go by.