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Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office life, American workplaces are settling into a new rhythm. Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home, a research team that tracks remote employment has found. And when you look at all workers – and not just those in remote-friendly positions – they’re working remotely 1.4 days a week, or 28% of the time.
That’s a huge change from 2019, when remote work accounted for only 7% of the nation’s paid workdays, even if it’s down from the height of the pandemic in 2020, when 61.5% of all work was remote. And it’s a giant leap from 1965, the dawn of telework. At that time, fewer than 0.5% of all paid workdays were out of the office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As management professors who study remote work and collaboration, we’ve learned a lot about remote work’s challenges and its often underappreciated advantages. In analyzing the latest data, we’ve observed that employers and employees are still trying to strike the balance between working from home and at the office. That’s why employers’ requirements for in-person work don’t always align with their employees’ preferences.
Hybrid work is on the rise
Employers swiftly made the jump to remote work in 2020. Zoom, along with other previously unfamiliar collaboration software companies, became commonplace overnight.
Five years later, many employers, including JPMorgan, TikTok, Amazon and the federal government, are rejecting remote work, demanding that employees return to the office full time.
But these examples are not the norm.
According to Flex Index, which tracks the workplace strategies of over 10,000 U.S. companies quarterly, fully in-office work is on the decline. At the start of 2023, 49% of employers insisted that their staff report to the office daily. That percentage fell to 32% at the end of 2024.
Companies are also retreating from remote-only work. While 31% of employers were fully remote in 2023, only 25% had remained fully remote at the end of 2024.
Instead, companies are increasingly turning to hybrid arrangements, in which employees spend a part of their week at the office. About 20% of professional workplaces were hybrid at the start of 2023. Just two years later, hybrid’s share had risen to 43%.
Some industries are more remote than others
The story of remote work is more complicated than general trends indicate. Its prevalence varies widely by industry, location and employer size.
The technology, insurance, telecommunications, professional services, and media and entertainment industries are among the biggest adopters of long-term remote and hybrid arrangements.
The states where remote and hybrid work are the most popular are Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and California. The states where it’s the least popular are Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Nebraska and Alaska. In part, some of these regional differences are due to where remote-friendly industries like technology and insurance are concentrated.
Businesses with 500 or fewer employees are the most likely to embrace remote work. Staying connected and coordinating with your colleagues is easiest with smaller teams, we’ve observed. Midsize employers, with 500 to 25,000 employees, are equally split across fully in-office, remote and hybrid strategies. Very large employers, which have 25,000 employees or more, are the most likely to adopt hybrid work.
These patterns show that remote work tends to be more popular among small employers, and in remote-friendly industries and states, whereas hybrid work has found a home in large companies.
What employees prefer
The remote work story is complicated also because employees have developed different preferences for in-office work, hybrid work and remote work over the course of the pandemic and since it subsided.
In 2024, roughly 25% of professional employees preferred office work, 35% preferred remote work, and 40% preferred hybrid work, according to research by Zoom. Even recent college graduates express a range of preferences: 15% prefer to work at an office, 20% prefer remote work, and 65% would rather have a hybrid schedule.
However, the ideal balance of office and remote work remains a point of contention. While employees favor three days at home and two in the office, employers prefer the opposite: three days in the office and two working remotely, the Zoom survey found.
Generally, the future of work looks hybrid. But the remote work of the lockdown days – what’s now known as “fully remote” – is also here to stay.
This is good news for those who prefer fully remote work. These employees are often parents or are caring for adults in need of assistance. They may live in rural communities or reside too far from their offices to regularly commute. Many LGBTQ+ employees and people of color have expressed a preference for remote work as a way to limit the microaggressions they experience on the job.
On the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown, there’s no one-size-fits-all workplace. And we believe that’s a good thing.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
