The percentage of days worked from home increased during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and then decreased until 2022.
It has plateaued in 2023, though, indicating that fewer businesses are bringing their staff back to work.
Long-term demographic and technological trends indicate that remote work may become more common by 2025 and beyond.
Economists noted that the percentage of employees being called back to the office has stagnated, indicating that the widespread remote work that was common during the pandemic has now become a permanent feature of the American labor market.
Nick Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor and authority on the work-from-home movement, wrote this week that “returning to the office is dead.”
According to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, 61.5% of paid, full workdays in May 2020—the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic—were completed from home. Through 2022, that percentage decreased by nearly half as businesses asked workers to resume in-person work.
But by 2023, things had changed.
According to Bloom, in an interview with CNBC, the percentage of paid work-from-home days has been “totally flat” this year, averaging about 28%. (That remains four-fold higher than the pre-pandemic level of 7%.) A similar pattern can be seen in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, he said.
The reasons why remote work has endured
Stay-at-home directives and COVID-19 lockdowns caused the first wave of remote work.
However, a lot of employees grew to like the setup. According to WFH Research, the main advantages include not having to commute, having flexible work schedules, and needing less time to get ready for work.
A strong job market in the United States since early 2021 has strengthened the trend and given workers unheard-of leverage. Employees had a good chance of quitting and finding employment elsewhere with better working conditions and pay if they didn’t like the benefits offered by the company.
There is “incredible diversity” in remote policies.
Nowadays, the majority of remote work is completed in a “hybrid” fashion, spending some days at home and the rest of the time at the office. As of October 2023, about 47% of workers who are eligible to work from home were hybrid, compared to 34% who are fully on site and 19% who work remotely full-time, according to WFH Research.
Compared to 3% prior to the pandemic, 11% of online job listings currently list positions as fully remote or hybrid, according to Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.
The new norm in the labor market is remote work, but there is a lot of variation from company to company, according to Pollak.
Why it’s likely that remote work will grow after 2025
Although it’s doubtful that the frequency of remote work will ever return to its pre-pandemic level, economists noted that it might slightly decline in the event of a U.S. recession and a weaker job market.
According to employers, retention is the main advantage of remote work, according to Pollak. More wiggle room in the labor market means that “retention gets much easier.”
But since telecommuting also saves businesses money, Bloom suggested that a significant downturn would probably require a deep recession.
