Even ultimatums aren’t enough to drive America’s workers back to the office en masse
With media giants Paramount, AT&T and The New York Times joining Microsoft and Amazon in stepping up their office attendance requirements, Corporate America seems keen to return back to the old normal... if only their employees would heed the call.
A growing number of return-or-exit ultimatums and crackdowns from companies don’t seem to be moving the needle, as the share of time that Americans spend working from home has plateaued for much of the last year. Data first reported by The Wall Street Journal from the US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes reveals that an average staffer has been spending about a quarter of their working time from home since 2023, when the share gradually dropped from a pandemic peak of 62%.
Per the WSJ, people also chose to spend merely 1% more days in the office every month since the start of 2024 — some 1.4 hours more on average — even as 12% more companies in the US now require employees to work in the office over the same period.
Tighter requirements could foreshadow job cuts, as stricter policy changes often precede or follow layoff announcements. Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s August labor market update observed that some employers were “reducing head counts through attrition — encouraged, at times, by return-to-office policies,” as working from home increasingly becomes a nonnegotiable for many, even if that means voluntarily quitting or cutting pay at times.
A growing number of return-or-exit ultimatums and crackdowns from companies don’t seem to be moving the needle, as the share of time that Americans spend working from home has plateaued for much of the last year. Data first reported by The Wall Street Journal from the US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes reveals that an average staffer has been spending about a quarter of their working time from home since 2023, when the share gradually dropped from a pandemic peak of 62%.
Per the WSJ, people also chose to spend merely 1% more days in the office every month since the start of 2024 — some 1.4 hours more on average — even as 12% more companies in the US now require employees to work in the office over the same period.
Tighter requirements could foreshadow job cuts, as stricter policy changes often precede or follow layoff announcements. Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s August labor market update observed that some employers were “reducing head counts through attrition — encouraged, at times, by return-to-office policies,” as working from home increasingly becomes a nonnegotiable for many, even if that means voluntarily quitting or cutting pay at times.
