It’s getting harder to find and keep remote jobs, five years out from the start of the pandemic. This year has been a big one for companies, especially in finance and tech, calling people back to the office, many full time.
Just in the last couple of weeks, Novo Nordisk and Paramount told employees they’d have to start coming in five days, and Microsoft and NBCUniversal announced they would be upping the number of required days in the office, too. JP Morgan, Amazon, AT&T, Dell and others have all started requiring employees to return to full-time in-office work this year as well. A majority of people working at Fortune 100 companies are now required to be in the office five days a week, up from just 5% in 2023.
Why now, after more than five years of hybrid and remote work?
“The biggest thing is the swing from being an employee market versus an employer market,” said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics.
For much of the last few years, she said, “companies were desperate for people, so they were doing anything they could to keep them happy.”
One way to do that was to let people keep working remotely, at least some of the time. Today, about 35% of people work from home at least one day a week.
But with a slowing job market, concerns about the economy, and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, many big, established companies feel like they don’t have to offer that flexibility anymore.
Especially those with powerful male CEOs, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh School of Business — they’re more likely to want people back in the office full time.
“These CEOs think or believe employees are not working when they are not in the office,” said Mark Ma, a lead researcher on the Pittsburgh study.
They’re also most likely to announce return-to-office mandates if the company’s stock hasn’t been performing well, his study found.
“That basically means the manager is facing a lot of pressure from investors, and he has to do something,” Ma said. “And the knee-jerk reaction is to call everyone back to the office.”
Whether employees are actually going back to the office as frequently as their employers want them to is another question.
“It seems like there are more companies pushing people back to the office, but when you look at the big data, the data the bosses don’t want you to see, which is cell phone tracking and [badge] swipes, you don’t see more people going in,” said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University. “So what it seems like is there’s a growing gap between what firms are asking and what’s actually happening on the ground.”
Some companies are doing return-to-office mandates partly as a way to get people to quit — doing layoffs without actually doing layoffs.
“Firms will announce a five-day return to the office, and then that day or a few days later they say, ‘oh, and by the way, we’re thinking of trimming headcount by five, ten percent. And if you’d like to leave because you don’t want to come in the office five days a week, you know, thank you very much, that would be great,’” Bloom said.
That’s what Zach Dawson did when JP Morgan announced a five-day return-to-office mandate earlier this year. He had started in the Atlanta office as a software engineer in 2023, and at the time the deal was he had to go in three days a week, which felt okay — his commute was quick, only about 15 minutes. Once he started, he also found he loved the work and the people.
“The team I had was probably — well not probably, it was definitely the best team I’ve ever been on,” he said.
But when the company announced everyone would have to start coming in full time this spring, Dawson immediately started looking for another job. He and his wife had recently had a baby, and they’d also moved farther away, so his commute could easily be an hour each way, time he would rather spend with his daughter than on the road. He also felt there was no good reason for the mandate.
“I got a lot more work done at home that I did in the office,” Dawson said. “The office felt like a place to socialize more than it was to work, in my opinion.”
He said many of his colleagues felt similarly. “Nobody wanted it at all. There were people posting in the internal boards complaining. Like, so many people.”
So many that the company locked the internal boards and shut down the discussion. (JP Morgan did not respond to a request for comment.)
Dawson lucked into another job quickly, one that was fully remote, so he quit. He knows at least two others from his team who have since left, too, “mainly due to RTO.”
That tracks with Nick Bloom’s research at Stanford: Only about 20% of people who work jobs that can be done remotely want to go to the office full time now, he’s found. But most like to go sometimes.
“Roughly a third of people really like work from home, and they can’t get enough,” he said. “These are folks, typically in their 30s and 40s with young kids.”
The 20% who like to go in every day?
“They’re in their early 20s, or 50 to 55-plus, and they find it more sociable and engaging,” he said.
Then the rest, about half of people whose jobs can be done remotely, want to go in two or three days a week. And Bloom’s research finds there is value in that.
“If you’re really concerned about productivity, this is much more of an issue if folks never come in the office,” he said. “But normally in the data if they’re in at least three days a week, it doesn’t really seem to matter if you push them to come in four or five days a week for performance.”
What mandating five days in the office does do is reduce employee satisfaction and increase turnover, especially among women and high-performing employees.
Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of the nonprofit public defender’s office Brooklyn Defender Services, is concerned about that, she said, “but I can’t let that be the deciding factor.”
She told her employees earlier this summer that after years of hybrid work she wanted them back in the office full time starting this month.
“I think each year that passes where you have people that never worked together in person before the pandemic, it gets more and more difficult to assure that the staff is getting all the skills that they need to get from us,” Schreibersdorf said.
She said she’s also heard from many of the newer employees that they want more in-person interaction, and she feels like it’s important for the clients they’re defending that they have a five-day in-office presence, too.
But the new mandate has been contentious with the Brooklyn Defender Services Union; so has the prospect of having to clock in and out with a location-based app.
“We take a pay cut by doing this job. You become a public defender because you care about the work,” said Rebecca Orleans, a criminal defense attorney at BDS. “It’s famously not well paid, very emotionally difficult, but you do it because you care.”
Orleans already spends a lot of time in court and in the office, but she also really values being able to work from home sometimes, to focus on writing motions and take sensitive calls with clients. Being able to finish her day sometimes and just be home or make it to her favorite workout class makes a difference, too. Having that flexibility taken away makes her feel disrespected.
“This is my dream job,” Orleans said. “But I also can’t work somewhere that gives me no flexibility and that insults my commitment to the work like this.”
For all the high-profile return-to-office announcements that have come and continue to come this year, big-picture, there has still been a notable shift toward remote and hybrid work since the pandemic began, according to Nick Bloom at Stanford.
In 2019, about 7% of days were worked from home. At the height of the pandemic, in April 2020, it was about 60%. Now, about 25% of days are worked from home, about four times what it was six years ago.
And despite what feels like a trend away from remote work right now, Bloom’s prediction is that six years from now, it will be more prevalent than it is today.
“I’ve been working on working from home as a research topic for 20 years, and before the pandemic, phrases like ‘shirking from home’ or ‘working remotely, remotely working’ were common. It was seen as a bit of a bad thing to do,” he said. “I think society has totally changed into a place where it’s normal, but yes, it is not normal every day. It’s normal maybe Monday and Fridays.”
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