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For millions of Americans who have grown accustomed to the flexibility provided by their work-from-home arrangements, it's been a gloomy start to the year. As of this month, employees at Amazon and AT&T are required to start showing up in the office five days a week. Then, on Tuesday, news broke that JPMorgan is preparing to revoke the hybrid privileges of about 40% of its workforce. (The other 60% are already required to come in every day). The headlines, the latest in a steady stream of return-to-office announcements, sparked yet another round of freakouts on Reddit, LinkedIn, and countless group texts. But as someone who keeps a close watch on the American workplace, I can tell you that I'm really not worried about the future of working from home. Whatever old-school CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Andy Jassy may think of it, remote work is here to stay.
For one, take a look at the stats. The economist Nick Bloom runs a monthly survey of American workers that tracks the prevalence of remote work. At the peak of COVID, in the spring of 2020, as much as 62% of work across the economy was being done from home. As the pandemic eased, that number came tumbling down — to 37% at the beginning of 2021, 33% in 2022, and 27% in 2023. The work-from-home dream appeared to be fading.
But in the two years since, something odd has happened. Despite all the headlines about companies getting rid of hybrid arrangements, the actual prevalence of remote work has barely budged. Last month, the share of work-from-home jobs remained at 27%. The RTO wars, it seems, have reached an impasse — one in which neither side is able to score any gains.
This impasse is all the more remarkable because of the weakness of the white-collar job market. As I've reported, hiring for corporate professionals has been in a huge slump, which has given employers the upper hand to do whatever they want about remote work without risking a mass exodus of disgruntled staffers. If CEOs were waiting for the ideal market conditions to drag everyone back into the office, this would definitely be the time to do it.
And yet, as the data shows, that hasn't happened — which suggests that CEOs, for the most part, are fine with the policies they have in place today. Even if they quietly wish more employees would come into the office, they don't seem to think it's worth the disruption that would come from forcing the issue.
In fact, when you zoom out and look at the current status of work from home, what you see is nothing short of a sea change. In 2019, Bloom and his team estimate, only 4.7% of work was performed from home. That means the current level of WFH is still six times larger than it was before the pandemic. For all the Amazons and JPMorgans that are reverting to their pre-COVID policies, the norm remains tilted to hybrid work to a degree that would have been unimaginable back in 2019.
In the long run, despite the RTO efforts by the likes of Amazon and JPMorgan, I actually think working from home is almost certain to become even more common. First, given America's slowing population growth, employers will soon find themselves facing a serious labor shortage. That will force them to offer all kinds of perks to attract and retain staff — and the flexibility to work from home is sure to be one of them. Second, the WFH-friendly startups that were founded during the pandemic will continue to grow. They'll not only employ more and more remote and hybrid employees — they'll eventually come to dominate entire sectors of the economy, further cementing the value of work from home. And third, the technology that enables us to collaborate at a distance will only get better over time, reducing what's probably the biggest pain point of remote work.
That's all to say that the reports of remote work's death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. After all, this is how big societal changes always happen: first comes innovation, then skepticism and fear, followed by a concerted push to return to the good old days. In the scheme of things, the office itself is a relatively recent innovation. Or consider one of the biggest inventions of Twain's time: the telephone. What was wrong with the telegraph, people asked. What's the point of switching to this new thing? Also, could it transmit ghosts? Could the electrical wiring shock you? Even as the devices proliferated, some worried that they portended the downfall of society. "The general use of the telephone," one New York Times writer lamented, "instead of promoting civility and courtesy, is the means of the fast dying out of what little we have left."
That's how laughable all the corporate hand-wringing about work from home is going to sound like a couple decades from now. Remote work, Jamie Dimon once groused, "doesn't work." History is in the process of proving him wrong.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
