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Key Takeaways A new survey shows that high-profile return‑to‑office mandates have not driven a broad collapse in remote work.
Economists found that work-from-home rates have plateaued rather than continuing to fall, suggesting a new equilibrium.
Economist Nicholas Bloom predicts that remote work is likely to expand, not shrink, over time.
CEOs of major firms, from NBCUniversal to Amazon, have recently begun requiring that employees spend more time in the office. Touting greater efficiency and collaboration, these chief executives are pushing back against remote work.
“I tell you, it doesn’t work in our business,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told Fox Business last year. JPMorgan mandated that its employees return to the office five days a week beginning in March 2025. “And for culture, you talk about culture, it’s impossible to do culture,” he added.
Despite the push for in-person work, new data suggests that return-to-office efforts have stalled. According to a monthly work-from-home survey run by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis, workers clocked in an average of 26% of paid, full days working from home in May. That is almost the same level as the 27% recorded two years ago.
The percentage was about 30% in 2022, when companies were recovering from the pandemic. However, in 2019, right before the pandemic, workers averaged 7% of their days working remotely.
“The data does seem at odds with the Jamie Dimon story of the world, where remote work is dead,” Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia who studies remote work, recently told The Wall Street Journal.
Instead of declining, remote work rates seem to have achieved a new equilibrium. More employees report working remotely than they did before the pandemic, the data shows.
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