() — As the economy slows, are employers beginning to regain control in negotiations with employees and job applicants? Pay is always an issue, of course, but in the wake of the pandemic, so is how long employers want people to work in person versus how long they’re willing to let employees work remotely.
According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), only 27.5% of private sector businesses reported that their employees worked from home or another remote location part of the time or all of the time between on August 1, 2022 and September 30, 2022.
In other words, 72.5% of private sector organizations – compared to 60% in the period from July to September 2021 – stated that they did not have employees working remotely.
Researchers and observers of working from home consider this percentage to be surprisingly high, considering the results of other studies and surveys. (We’ll talk about them soon.)
Private sector companies employ the majority of American workers, and according to the Pew Research Center, 61% of workers do not have jobs that can be done remotely. But it should be noted that the BLS results do not measure patterns of telecommuting in federal, state, and local governments, in nonprofit organizations, or among the self-employed.
The BLS survey also interpreted respondents’ responses as referring to a company’s formal telecommuting policies, rather than whether some employees telework informally at times, such as by responding to work emails from home. .
“To the extent that ‘working from home’ would include someone checking email outside of business hours, we did not want to include that type of informal work activity in the estimates, as it would likely fall under the ‘rarely or never,'” a BLS spokesperson said in an email to .
What others have discovered
Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford, thinks it’s hard to glean much from the 72.5% BLS survey, because he thinks respondents must have misinterpreted the first question in the survey, which asked, “Are there any employees in this place that teleworks to some extent? In his opinion, “any amount” includes answering work emails or taking a work call from home.
Semantics aside, however, the confusion and surprise at the BLS results reminds us that there is still no standard or easy way to measure the full extent of remote work in a post-pandemic world.
Other surveys and studies of people who work for all kinds of companies – not just those in the private sector – suggest that telecommuting for those whose jobs can be done remotely is still commonplace in this post-pandemic period.
The Pew Research Center, for example, found in a nationally representative survey of full-time working American adults conducted in February that 41% of workers with home-based jobs now work a hybrid schedule. This figure is up from 35% in January last year.
Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, 63% say that their company requires them to come to the workplace with some regularity; 59% say they usually work from home three or more days a week.
This suggests that the pressure from large companies -such as Disney, Amazon, Manzana and several wall street banks– for employees to return to the office three or more days a week may not have changed much.
For its part, Kastle Systems, which runs security card-swiping machines in office buildings across the United States, says the average weekly office occupancy rate at the end of March in the most populous cities in the United States was 49%. from pre-pandemic levels. Although this figure is well above the occupancy rates recorded during the height of the pandemic, it is still a far cry from the occupancy rates recorded in February 2020, just before the pandemic.
The latest results from the monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) survey, which Bloom and other researchers have conducted since May 2020, found that the overall average number of paid days worked from home in 2023 so far is 1. 4 per week (or 28% of the work week). This is based on responses from Americans ages 20 to 64 who earned $10,000 or more in the previous year.
The same respondents said their companies plan to allow employees to work remotely 2.2 days a week, for those who can. This figure is higher than the 1.6 days forecast in August 2020, although less than the 2.4 days forecast in June 2022.
According to SWAA, working from home is more prevalent in cities and in sectors such as information and technology, finance and insurance, and professional and business services. This is somewhat similar to the BLS finding that telecommuting is most common in the following industries: information, professional and business services, educational services, and wholesale trade.
Hybrid is here to stay, but fully remote work is on the decline
Remote work experts say with certainty that hybrid schedules will remain a permanent feature of work in the United States for a number of reasons – including increased engagement and retention of workers – although parameters and problems are still resolved in real time.
“Companies are still trying to figure it out,” says Sara Sutton, CEO of the remote work platform FlexJobs, which she founded 16 years ago. But, Sutton added, “hybrid is where things will settle.”
When it comes to the general average of how often employers will allow their employees to work from home, Bloom believes that it will be 25% of the week. “I’ve talked to hundreds of companies about working from home in the last three weeks, and it’s clear that it’s leveling off at a post-pandemic norm,” he says in an email.
In the meantime, fully remote jobs will continue to exist, but they may be less prevalent than they have been lately. In the February Pew survey, 35% of people who were able to telecommute were doing so full time, down from 55% in October 2020, but still well above the 7% who worked remotely. full time before the pandemic.
