The same percentage of employed people who worked remotely in 2023 is the same as the previous year, a survey found
Don’t call it work from home any more, just call it work. According to new data, what once seemed like a pandemic necessity has become the new norm for many Americans.
Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases the results of its American time use survey, which asks Americans how much time they spend doing various activities, from work to leisure.
The most recent survey results, released at the end of June, show that the same percentage of employed people who did at least some remote work in 2023 is the same percentage as those who did remote work in 2022.
In other words, it’s the first stabilization in the data since before the pandemic, when only a small percentage of workers did remote work, and a sign that remote work is here to stay.
Great news for disabled people. Gives us a much better chance at finding a job willing to hire us!
I started a new position in my company in February 2020, just weeks before the lock down. Since then I’ve been almost entirely working from home, coming into the office maybe 10 days over the past 4 years.
During that time I’ve been promoted, gotten a separate pay raise to a new band, helped onboard the entire rest of my team (two of whom are completely remote).
I’ve done nothing but prove over and over again that I am excelling at my job remotely.
They are still pushing for me to come back to a “hybrid” 3 day a week schedule. Madness.
I think hybrid has its place. But it’s definitely not a one size fits all
There is work like construction, transportation, and customer service that can’t really be remote.
I’m not sure if there’s a good argument for work that can be done remotely to insist on both in person and remote work. It doubles the amount of workstation resources required, or compromises on at least one of them.
Maybe teams benefit from in-person communication? That’s probably simpler for some that haven’t found comparable online versions of whiteboarding tools or whatever. Good tools do exist, but feel people that haven’t adapted to them by now, it’ll take some real demand to make it happen. This might not be a characteristic of a highly effective team, though.
Most frequently, hybrid insistence seems do be more about justifying middle management, based on my highly unscientific observations.
Depends on what you define as work
I think people are very selfish, they only thick shit what they get from being in the office a few days, not what they could bring to everyone else.
You might not be a person who needs much social contact, but other people in your company is. And I think for a company to work you’ll need both people and you need to meet both half way.
Communication on teams meetings is extremely sub par. 90% just sit there on mute. They don’t speak because they’ll interrupt everything. There’s no dynamic.
They are still pushing for me to come back to a “hybrid” 3 day a week schedule. Madness.
3 days at office or 3-days work week?
Three days per work week “on average” - but with no details over what timeframe that average is calculated.
still pushing for me to come back to a “hybrid” 3 day a week schedule
Offer to come back on a part-time basis, with them deciding which days you are working from home.
Those - the days you’re working safely from home - will be the days you work for them. But it’s entirely up to them how many days each week they have you as a resource.
And yet my company is forcing me back into the office, I’ve been resisting for over a year, and now they’re threatening hr->path to firing for insubordination if I don’t come in… I’ve been working remotely effectively since March 2020.
Started sending out applications to actual remote jobs, it just sucks, it was a good gig while it lasted.
I’m curious how this impacts decentralization in terms of population density.
You could cure traffic congestion, repopulate rural communities with less conservative folk, and generally improve overall life satisfaction if more jobs became remote and access to high speed internet in rural communities became more common.
Would arguably reduce housing costs on average?
At my previous job, I had a coworker who was hired on after the office decided work from home would be permanent. Everyone in the office was originally from northern Illinois since that’s where the office was, but she lived in rural Iowa in a farm with her husband. She mentioned how she really wasn’t able to get a job like this previously as she would have to commute long distance to the city. And of course she and her husband can’t just pack up the farm and move it closer to her work. So you’re absolutely right! Work from home could very well be the thing that saves small communities that have been largely going off.
Would arguably reduce housing costs on average?
(Canadian here with some knowledge of the industry)
It hasn’t reduced prices on average, but it does flatten out the distribution across the country. I would say that for small towns the short-term effect has been overall negative, because it drives up housing prices in regions that historically have lower wages, and also ties up the construction industry and drives up prices there as well, so it becomes more difficult to both buy an existing house and build a new one. The real winners in the equation are the remote workers who are no longer tied to big cities and can use their “big city money” to buy pretty much whatever they want in a small town.
Long-term (after things have stabilized, maybe a decade, and assuming the “immigrants” stick around) it will be more positive, because the small towns’ tax base and demographics will be rejuvenated. Short term infrastructure pains are real though.
This come up sometimes and I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t live in a city just because that’s where work is. I live here because it’s dense, walkable, has a lot of stuff happening every day, and many different people.
Moving out to a rural or suburban space is a huge downgrade on most metrics I care about.
I still want to work from home.
However, a lot of folks would love to work at a California based company, be paid California based wages, and then live in an Arkansas cost of living. You have a super valid point for your own standard of living, but there are plenty of workers willing to make that trade for the financial security.
Suddenly a percentage of the Arkansas population actually has a decent amount of income, you start getting some purchases and tax income in the area, now the ass end of Podunk, AK actually has a little bit of cash money to invest in their area. Rinse and repeat in a hundred thousand little drive-by towns across rural America. As long as it has internet connection someone can make a good living there, and that’s a huge difference to what we’ve traditionally seen in those towns - that being, everyone is broke as shit, so there’s no real upward mobility for anyone because there’s no new money coming in. This is a huge step forward towards addressing that.
I mean, you’re probably not wrong. Getting more money in the hands of poor people would likely be good for everyone.
But i would rather have people live in denser, more walkable, more human spaces. We don’t really need to have our living spaces where the nearest grocery is 5 miles away.
Why would we want to keep the sprawl and low density as a first class option? We don’t need to keep people living in Podunk, AR just because that’s where they are. It’s expensive for society. We should be discouraging low density.
Interesting insight I’ve heard echoed before, thanks. Question: do you have kids or plan to have kids?
I’ve never lived in the downtown of a city before. I can only say I’ve lived the suburban life of a big city and a deeply rural countryside. For me, I like a bit of breathing room. I don’t like the hussel of the city, nor how people tend to generally become less friendly as density rises. I miss the small-town feel or rural privacy. I certainly dislike the pollution (air, traffic, noise) and raising my kids in it. I’m not a party animal who likes the night life either. Even before kids.
I don’t have kids but I’m close to someone who does. I play Legos with the kid and don’t have to change diapers. It’s great. We’re in Brooklyn.
I’m not sure I know what you mean by breathing room. I’m not far from prospect Park.
The idea of privacy is kind of counter intuitive. In the city people see you but they don’t typically care. It’s like being invisible. But better, actually, because when you get in a bike accident then people do see you and help.
I don’t know about less friendly. Differently friendly, maybe. I don’t talk to people on the street or subway. I talk to people at bars or meetups or shows.
I would never ever want to subject my hypothetical kids to a suburban life. That’s what I had. Couldn’t do shit. Everything’s too far away, and the roads are too dangerous to walk or bike on.
I was so jealous of the kids I knew that grew up in the city. They’d tell me about how they’d gone ice skating or to a punk show or to a board game shop, and I’d be like wow I can’t do any of that. It’s either just not here (music), or I can’t get there because walking for miles/down a highway is dangerous.
All of this is written specifically from the experience of NYC and its suburbs. I haven’t lived anywhere else long enough to speak to it.
It already reduces housing costs for those who move away from high cost of living areas. Also, access to high speed internet is already common in rural areas of the USA. It wasn’t 10 years ago but we’ve made a lot of progress.
Ideally you want the opposite. Sure not commuting to work saves a lot of emissions, but not driving in the first place is much better. Cities are far more energy efficient that spread out suburban housing.
I definitely do not want to live in a city, especially if I don’t have to go into an office. Living and working in the same closet-sized apartment would drive me insane.
Many apartments are in fact larger than a closet.
Walkable areas are probably the most important thing. The way most suburbs are set up so you have to drive everywhere is just a bad idea on every metric.
Wait a moment…
“Work from home is here to stay, US data shows”
“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O”
