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Something about a big return to the office makes no sense.
In the last few years, all kinds of great employers have been raising their rules for work from home.
Decided that time for many of their staff, in words British stars with TV, Lord Alan Sugar, “to return to the office.”
Not all companies joined Goldman Sachs and Tesla and asked for a full -time return. But Many followed IBM, Deutsche Bank and even zoomPoster child of the remote revolution and adopted stricter rules of home processing.
But here’s the unusual things: at least, at least, statistics suggest that working from the house level remained noticeably stable. This is confusing, even for experts who have studied remote work long before the pandemic has made practice in the main. “I’m honestly confused,” Stanford University economist, Professor Nick Bloom, told me this week.
His researchWhich includes monthly surveys of thousands of American workers shows a share of work from home, rose significant below 10 percent before Coid at 61 percent at the height of Pandemia 2020, before sinking to about 30 percent on the eye 30 percent 2022.
But these levels remained incredibly straight from the end of 2023, and they never fall below 26 percent. You can see a similar pattern in the level of a visit to the Office.
So, what explains the gap between this stubborn persistence of remote work and all the news of the staff who pull back to the office?
That could be a matter of perception. The immovable news rules mean that a company that does something unpopular or destroying, such as a distance reduction, tends to be more valuable than the news than that holds for business as usual.
Perhaps the idea of great return remote work has always been a distance from the less exciting reality of many employers who have quietly participated in existing hybrid working arrangements.
There are reasons to think like that.
Some of The biggest fans Working from home are smaller, younger, lesser -known companies that, as Bloom points out, are among the fastest companies. Their expansion can compensate for more noticeable reduction in domestic work in older companies.
Also, the longer the hybrid work lasts, the more obvious its advantages for some companies.
I sympathize with the critics of remote work that care that they are disturbed, atomized home workers can be less productive, less sensitive and more unrelated than their colleagues in the office. Some office work is best done in person, especially if it requires real -time checks and fast decisions. But I am not surprised by the research that shows the increasing hybrid form of work three days a week in the office, and two at home can be happy with workers and finance directors.
When a large Chinese passenger technology company called Trip.com made a six -month trial to compare such workers with colleagues with full -time work, she revealed that the hybrid work increased her job satisfaction and, which was crucial, reduced the reversal rate for a third. There was no sign of a falling performance.
Managers were more positive about hybrid work after the trial than before it, to the extent that when the experiment was completed, the company decided to expand the hybrid policy to all employees at once.
Their logic was simple, according to a paper Bloom and colleagues were published at the trial last year. “Each quitting cost the company approximately $ 20,000 employment and training, so one third of a reduction in wear of the company would create millions of dollars of savings.”
Since Trip.com has announced its decision, other Chinese technological companies have adopted similar hybrid policies.
Because of all this, 2025 can be a year when the work of the house rate is finally reduced. Companies like Amazon,, Pwc and Starbucks Last year, they made titles for stricter rules that were not to start by January. Firmer policies in other companies, such as WPPThe advertising group, should start by April. A re -choice of Donald Trump, which ordered Federal workers back to the office full time on the first day of their Presidency, could strengthen several major managers to act. Maybe it is approaching the end of a long calm before the storm of returning to the office.
Even if that happens, the idea that work patterns will ever come back to what they were before the pandemic had torn them up while it is very difficult to imagine at the moment.
