Just how many people work from home these days? This question has puzzled me a bit, but a team of St. Louis Fed researchers may have the answer. They combined data from several sources to come up with overall estimates for 2020 through 2024.
One thing they discovered is that a lot of the disparity between different sources was due to self-employed workers. The numbers tighten up if you consider only employees—which is generally what we care about anyway.
The charts below show the rates over time for (a) 100% remote workers and (b) the share of remote days for all workers:
In both cases, after peaking early in the pandemic, remote work rates have steadily fallen back. Fully remote work has gone from 7% to 11%—a big percentage gain but not really a lot in absolute terms.
Likewise, total remote days is considerably higher than it was before the pandemic, but even at that it's only about 22% and still declining. It's significant but not earthshaking.
This may be the answer to the weird mismatches I've noticed for things like office vacancy rates, commuting times, and reported WFH hours. Maybe working from home hasn't increased all that much and continues to decline as employers tire of it. It might still be a couple of years—and a bracing recession—before we really know how this will play out.
I have a nine minute commute and young children. Trust me, those eighteen minutes are an extremely small price to pay in order to work in a calm setting laid out exactly as I need.
Not everybody has a nine minute commute or young children that they need to escape from. But please go on about how your lifestyle choices and work preferences should be the default for all of America’s employees.
For what it’s worth, Work From Home was a godsend when my mom had metastatic breast cancer spreading to her brain before she died. I would otherwise have to take unpaid FMLA leave, but for WFH allowing me to juggle taking care of her with work tasks. For every “I spawned kids that I need a break from” story, there’s another “work from home provides better work/life balance” story for someone else.
Employers should let everyone decide for themselves whether the office or home is best.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
By "popular" you mean "only kinda common." WFH is much more popular than its actual rate of usage (by the common definition of "popular", which is the usage you should prioritize since you're a semi-public figure posting online).
This would be like saying "financial independence is... only kinda popular."
Bruh. Come on. I get that you're inexplicably anti-WFH, but come. on. Transparent narrative building is transparent.
Agreed. It's misleading. On purpose. Eye roll.....
My company went full WFH and sold its buildings along the way. Why? Because we got a better pool of workers when we weren’t limited to one or two locations (and this was DC and NYC - but a lot like of amazing people don’t want to relocate for a job). Turns out you do better as a company when your pool of applicants grows. Amazing what this newfangled internet thing can do for you!!!
And it saves money!
22% + 11% = 33% of the workforce that is at least working from home some of the time. That's up from ~20% just before the pandemic, according to that chart. Going from 1/5 of the workforce to 1/3rd seems to me to be a pretty big deal.
I have to agree that the charts just do not show what Kevin claims for them. The usual graph-bound contrarianism?
I'm seeing the expected sharp peak for the lockdown, followed by a truly gradual decline rather than the return to "normal" that those at the time might have expected. And that has been followed by a leveling off almost entirely for a full year so far. (And oh, that expectations of "normal" of course have one thing to do with voters globally hating incumbents, along with much else.)
Now factor in just how many can't help showing up for work, such as the service sector, health care, manufacturing, and farming. So maybe those who "choose" WFH but don't really get to choose (or who choose for their employees to save office rent) are a bigger deal?
What is this bracing recession of which you speak? And how do we avoid/minimize it?
We had our chance, but we elected Trump.
The changes appear to be pretty dramatic changes. Roughly doubling from 2019.
Considering that a large portion of the work that needs to be done cannot be done from home, this large change is even more dramatic.
Throwing out self employed workers also understates the state of the world in this regard.
Kevin may not want this to be the case.....but the numbers seem to speak for themselves. Big changes.
If working from home isn’t popular…
1. Why is my office building only a quarter full every time I go in? Nobody requires work from home anymore. Everybody has been free to work 100% of the week from the office since 2021. Yet it seems people are voting with their feet by staying home most days I actually go in.
2. Why do companies have to require in-office work to happen if collaboration is so great and WFH is allegedly unpopular? Usually, companies don’t have to coerce workers to do things they already want to do. (No company requires bathroom visits, for example, because workers already want to go to the bathroom.)
Work From Home appears to be a classic revealed preference by both workers’ and employers’ behavior. Perhaps people with families hate it, which I would argue is another revealed preference about how much they actually like their family members. But it certainly isn’t unpopular by those still gladly using it.
Looking at the charts again, all they prove is:
(1) Employers have the upper hand. If they insist on everyone working in an office for whatever reason - “collaboration and camaraderie,” managers feel they can’t trust their direct reports, lease contracts they can’t get out of, whatever (but never it seems to be increased productivity) - they can force most people to comply because they need their paychecks. Surprise that the country with the stingiest public benefits leaves most people tethered to their bosses’s whims - we also still see this with health insurance especially in the non-ACA states.
(2) Despite employers’ efforts to push everyone back into the office, 11-33% of employees still work from home part or all week. Since few employers actually require WFH, this suggests that workers who aren’t coerced into the office by (1) above actually voluntarily choose to WFH some or all of the week. Quelle surprise on that one too - not all of us hate spending time with the people in our households and/or miss the inane conversation of our coworkers.
Something doesn’t have to be liked or used by everyone or even a majority to be “popular.” Almost nothing we call “popular” has literally 165m+ Americans liking or using it to fit that definition.
I think the WFH discussion above misses the main drawback of WFH: people starting out in the workplace no longer have the opportunity to learn professional work behavior, bond with co-workers by gossiping around the water cooler, finding a mentor etc.
In a few years some of these people will be in management. Should be an interesting dynamic.
Why would it be any different than in-person? If you (as a company) suck at training new staff on workplaces practices remotely, I pretty much guarantee that you also sucked at it in-person. To wit, you probably didn't do fucking anything and just expected them to figure it out on their own. That's a pretty shitty practice. Those companies that are actually intentional about their onboarding therefore have an advantage in a remote workplace.
Same thing with management. Almost everybody is a fucking terrible manager unless they've actually learned management skills. I actually think those promoted to management positions after WFH/remote work will be better (because they've been forced to learn people skills and how to be intentional), and certainly not any worse, than those promoted to management positions from in-person work (where simply being good looking or sociable often gets you the position, regardless of your lack of management skills).
This argument is, to me, just the same old old-fashioned fear of change and inability to get past a surface level analysis-by-gut-feeling.
Agreed. If your companies plan for training, mentoring and team bonding is to just let everyone figure it out for themselves at the water cooler, you don't actually have a good setup for any of this. You are losing nothing by going remote and losing the 'water cooler effect', because you didn't actually ever have anything to lose.