A few years after the pandemic, which sent millions of Americans home from work to their basements and bedrodog, working from home is becoming less common.
A report from the Labor Department that came out this week says that 72.5% of businesses said that their employees rarely or never worked from home last year. From 60.1% in 2021, this number went up. The survey showed that there would be about 21 million more full-time workers on-site in 2022 than the year before. An establishment is each location of a business, like a single restaurant in a chain.
The new number is also close to the 76.7% of businesses that were open in February 2020 and said they didn’t have any employees who worked from home before the Covid-19 pandemic. Employers are putting more pressure on their employees to work on-site more often because they are worried about a recession. This is because they want to make sure their employees are productive.
Mike Steinitz, senior executive director at Robert Half, said, “There’s a sense that innovation, creativity, and collaboration can suffer when teams aren’t together.” The global recruitment firm did a survey and found that 92% of managers would rather have their teams work on-site.
“I never dreamt of success. I worked for it.”
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“They think that people are just more productive at work,” he said. “They also think it’s important for training and mentoring for both new and current employees.”
Several big companies have said that they want their workers to come in more often in person. Walt Disney Co. now wants to be on-site four days a week. Starbucks Corp. has asked office workers to come in more. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., the company that owns Facebook, told employees this month that face-to-face time helps build relationships and get more done.
Work from Home: Employees
In a letter to employees, he said, “Our guess is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that these relationships help us work better.”
The share of businesses with hybrid arrangements, where employees split their time between home and work, went down by 13.4 percentage points across the private sector from 2021 to 2022. This happened in all measured industries. In the financial sector, which includes banks and brokerages, the drop was especially sharp. The number of hybrid financial institutions dropped from 44.9% in 2021 to 22% in 2022.
Service jobs, like those in retail, restaurants, and hotels, were the least likely to let people work from home. Gains in employment in these areas led to more people working on jobsites. Nearly 30% of the 7.7 million jobs added in the private sector since August 2021 were in leisure and hospitality and retail.
The Labor Department’s survey asked about telework, which it defines as a way for an employee to use the internet and other digital communications to work from home or another remote location. In 2022, the survey was taken in August and September. In 2021, the survey was taken from July to September.
When hybrid work was stopped, many businesses had to send everyone back to the job site, but not all.
Some jobs that are usually done in an office continued to have a fair amount of remote work last year. In the information sector, which includes tech and media companies, 67.4% of businesses said that some or all of their employees worked remotely. The share was 49% in the professional and business sector, which includes law firms and accounting firms.
Work from Home: Labor Department
The Labor Department said that the number of fully remote businesses went up slightly from 10.3% in 2021 to 11.1% last year. This share went up by 4.8 percentage points to 42.2% in the information industry. Smaller increases were seen in financial activities, professional services, and business services. Mr. Steinitz said that companies in many of these mostly white-collar industries were more flexible before the pandemic.
Economists who used a different survey that looked at the number of days worked remotely think that remote work will still be around in 2023, even though it seems to be on the decline.
According to research by economists Jose Maria Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago, in February 2023, 27.7% of all days worked were done from home. In 2022, the average number of days worked from home was 30% each month. The percentage has gone down a lot since May 2020, when about 60% of days were remote. However, it is still more than five times what it was before the pandemic.
Mr. Bloom said that the slight drop in work-from-home days is caused by two things. He said that managers and professionals are being told by their companies to go back to work more days each week. And the number of people who work completely from home is going down. The survey that Mr. Bloom and his colleagues did showed that the number of employees who worked full-time on-site rose from 54.6% in November 2021 to 60.8% in February. More than two-thirds of this change was caused by the falling number of people who worked from home all the time.
“Slowly, these people who work from home full-time are being asked to come back to the office or moved to a different country,” Mr. Bloom said. “Wages in the United States are very high, so sending fully remote workers to Mexico, the Philippines, or India can save a lot of money.”
But remote work isn’t likely to go away completely
Staffing firm ManpowerGroup says that 13% of the jobs being posted right now are for jobs that can be done from home. That’s less than the 17% in March 2022, but a lot more than the 4% before the pandemic.
