A New Survey Says This Popular Type of Work Is Thriving Despite CEO Resistance

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. 

Additional data backs remote work

Workplace activity data points in the same direction. Kastle Systems, a security company that monitors key card swipes, found that average office occupancy across 10 major cities is only marginally higher than it was a year ago, per the Journal. 

Meanwhile, cellphone location data registered by technology company Placer.ai indicates that average visits per working day in May were still about 32% lower than in May 2019. 

The data shows that while high-profile return-to-office mandates may seem significant, they only cover a slice of the 163 million people in the U.S. labor force. That consideration helps explain why the broader data tells a different story from major companies requiring more of an in-office presence. 

Why Bloom thinks there will be more remote work in the future

Bloom, one of the economists who ran the survey, told the Journal that younger CEOs were more likely to have flexible work arrangements for their employees. In a recent study, Bloom found that employees at companies with young CEOs worked from home more frequently than employees at companies with older CEOs.

“If you look at CEOs who were 40 or under during the pandemic, they’re far more likely nowadays to have at least hybrid in their companies,” Bloom told the Journal. “Older CEOs generationally are just less used to it.”

That’s why Bloom thinks that remote work is likely to expand, not shrink, over time. He predicted that as older executives retire, they will be replaced by younger leaders who are far more at ease with employees working from home at least part of the week. 

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.