Even ultimatums aren’t enough to drive America’s workers back to the office
With media giants Paramount, AT&T, and The New York Times joining Microsoft and Amazon in stepping up their office attendance requirements, Corporate America seems keen to return back to the old normal... if only their employees would heed the call.
A growing number of return-or-exit ultimatums and crackdowns from companies don’t seem to be moving the needle, as the share of time that Americans spend working from home has plateaued for much of the last year.
Data first reported by The Wall Street Journal from the US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes reveals that an average staffer has been spending about a quarter of their working time from home since 2023, when the share gradually dropped from a pandemic peak of 62%.
The percentage of full paid days worked from home has bounced between 25% and 30% for essentially four years at this point.
Per the WSJ, people also chose to spend merely 1% more days in the office every month since the start of 2024 — about 1.4 hours more on average — even as 12% more companies in the US began requiring employees to work in the office over the same period.
That said, things might be changing. The Federal Reserve’s August labor market update observed that some employers were “reducing head counts through attrition — encouraged, at times, by return-to-office policies,” as working from home increasingly becomes a nonnegotiable for many, even if that means voluntarily quitting or cutting pay at times.
The Takeaway
Your typical worker is putting in between one and two days worked from home per week. Companies have tried to squeeze workers a little bit to get that down to, say, zero days per week, but we appear to have hit something of a national impasse at this point. Workers really seem reluctant to give up that one day from home, and companies haven’t really been able to coax that last day out of them by any means outside of outright termination. Where do things go from here? It depends on that labor market.
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