Experts in the job market and human resources say that the days when bosses expected workers to be in the office a certain number of days a week may be coming to an end. And workers seem to be taking advantage, as more and more of them spend some time working from home.
The latest sign that companies are becoming less strict about working from home is the August jobs report, which came out last week. It shows that workers are still attached to their flexible schedules. Some of the questions in the Bureau of Labour Statistics report that ask families about their jobs also ask about telework, or working from home for pay.
22.8% of people said they did some or all of their job from home in August. That’s up from 19.5% in the same month last year. The number of people who worked from home some of the time went up from 9.2% to 11.7%. It also went up from 10.3% to 11.1% of people who worked from home all the time.
Even though the job market has slowed down and companies are showing signs of taking back control, more people are choosing to stay home from work. Long gone are the days when workers’ requests told everyone what to do. But since the beginning of 2024, more workers have said that they do some of their work from home, and the August jobs report kept that trend.
Since the beginning of 2024, about 23% of workers have said they have done all or part of their work from home. Those numbers show that’s up from about 19% in 2023.
A senior partner at the human resources consulting company Mercer, Ravin Jesuthasan, said, “There are still strict employers out there.” He works there to help employers and study the future of work. “I think what you are starting to see is the settling into some new level of rationality,” he said.
“Something must be able to be changed.”
The rise in remote work from one year to the next isn’t big, but it goes against the story of a slow and steady return to the office after the pandemic, where bosses keep taking away more in-office days from workers.
It was one thing for bosses to set strict rules about how many days a week workers had to be in the office. But Jesuthasan said it was a different story when it came to trying to make those rules stick.
He said, “It is very hard to police this.” “It’s very hard to make sure compliance.”
He also said that companies seem to have found a balance where expectations at work are less strict and more implied. This way, both workers and bosses understand why people need to be together on certain days instead of just meeting a quota.
He said, “I’m not seeing the clear backing off of mandates.” In more than one case, the rule is not being followed. I’d say it’s a lot more suggested than a promise.
Two of Jesuthasan’s client companies, one in manufacturing and one in financial services, stopped trying to police their in-office attendance rules in a quiet way this spring. “But the noise level just kept getting ratcheted up,” he said. The bosses of the company thought that the initial backlash from workers against having to spend time in the office would go away.
He said that the rules about going back to the office had become a distraction because managers were spending too much time going over rules again and again and dealing with individual cases.
It hasn’t been easy for businesses who want to keep good employees because of strict rules, said Michael Steinitz, senior executive director of professional talent solutions at Robert Half RHI -0.64%, a staffing company that helps companies hire people and people find jobs.
He said, “It was almost like employers wanted to make a point with these rules and see where it went.” It was clear from the market response that people are ready to come to work, but there needs to be some flexibility.
He said that Robert Half is seeing more job ads for hybrid roles than it did the year before. He said that if a job seeker needs to be able to work from home, they should put that ahead of negotiating other perks and rewards.
That person might be ready to take less money in order to have more freedom, he said. “There’s some giving and taking going on here, and I think we’ll be seeing more of these kinds of talks.”
A poll from the Conference Board in June found that almost half (45%) of human resources professionals who work for companies that require or strongly expect employees to be present on-site said they had trouble keeping workers.
According to the poll, 15% of human resources professionals said it was hard to keep workers when employers let them choose where they worked.
“Continue to feel like it’s better together,” say employers.
It is true that it is hard to say exactly how much online work vs. office attendance affects people. You can look at more than just the BLS stats.
Kastle Systems, a company that makes security technology, has been tracking office occupancy for a long time and has found that it has been slowly going up since 2021, though the numbers vary a lot by area and day of the week.
Records from Kastle showed that on September 4, office usage was 2.6% higher in 10 U.S. cities than it was on the Wednesday after Labour Day in 2017. There was an almost 7% rise in the area around New York City and big cities in Texas.
Haniel Lynn, CEO of Kastle, said that his data and stories from companies don’t point to a move away from face-to-face work.
„Employers continue to feel like it’s better to work together; there is more community and interest when people work together,“ he said. Lynn said that some companies look at building-access data to see who is really coming to work.
“With the way the economy is right now, companies are probably more determined than ever to stick to the rules they set,” he said.
Based on statistics from Kastle, the average number of people working in an office last week was 49.3% of pre-pandemic levels, up from 48.5% the week before. Most offices were full on September 4, which was the busiest day.
Jesuthasan said that some business leaders may be using the fact that the economy and job market are slowing down as an excuse to make people show up to work every day. I think that the ordinary CEO has much more important things to do, though.
Nick Bloom is an economist at Stanford University and a top researcher on remote work. He said that he had been expecting a shift back to more work being done from home after the call to go back to the office after the pandemic.
Technology is getting better, and companies with younger employees are more open to having workers who can do some of their work from home. He also said that office leases take time to end, and some companies may decide not to pay for a real office once their lease is up.
Bloom was ready for more work to be done at home to start as early as next year and continue through 2026 and 2027. He said, “There is nothing stopping this, and working from home will become more popular in the long run,” but he was “surprised to see this so quickly.”
