{"id":30033,"date":"2023-10-27T11:12:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T11:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/isafespend.com\/personal-finance\/taxes\/is-working-from-home-falling-or-stabilizing-both\/"},"modified":"2023-10-27T11:12:44","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T11:12:44","slug":"is-working-from-home-falling-or-stabilizing-both","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/isafespend.com\/?p=30033","title":{"rendered":"Is Working From Home Falling Or Stabilizing? Both."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Is working from home (WFH) falling, signaling that workers have to go back to the office? Or is WFH now a permanent part of future work, jobs, and careers? Well, actually both. But the future, even with higher permanent levels of WFH, remains unsettled for workers and employers.<\/p>\n

Where WFH fits into your future depends on your industry, occupation, and the overall labor market. There\u2019s a lot of turmoil as employers and workers experiment and figure it out, but WFH has become a much larger part of the labor market than many analysts (including me) thought it would.<\/p>\n

Recent data on declines in working from home (WFH) could reflect, as a recent Bloomberg story put it, that \u201cthe push by employers to get American workers back into the office appears to be working.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bloomberg story uses the Census Bureau\u2019s Household Pulse Survey. When the pandemic hit in 2021, the economy and employment cratered. We lost almost 22 million jobs in two months, an unprecedented shock in the postwar period of over 14% of total employment. Scrambling for real time data to guide businesses, workers, and government, the Pulse Survey surveys tens of thousands of households.<\/p>\n

<\/fbs-ad><\/p>\n

The most recent results show \u201cfewer than 26% of US households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week,\u201d which Bloomberg notes is \u201ca sharp decline from the early 2021 peak of 37%,\u201d representing \u201ca post-pandemic low.\u201d They attribute the drop to \u201cthe continued push by many employers to get staff to return to offices.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, case closed? Falling WFH rates, driven by employer demands, mean more and more workers have office work in their future?<\/p>\n

Not so fast. Other analysts, like Stanford\u2019s Nick Bloom, one of the top researchers on WFH, say it is \u201dhere to stay.\u201d Bloom says the data show not a continuing drop in WFH, but rather \u201cthat returning to the office (R.T.O.) is D.O.A.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bloom points to office occupancy rates, measured (imperfectly) by keycard swipes collected in Kastle Systems \u201cBack to Work Barometer.\u201d Kastle averages swipes across ten major U.S. metro areas, and their most recent number shows 50.3% average office occupancy, compared to over 95% prior to the pandemic.<\/p>\n

50.3% is much higher than the pandemic low point of around 15% right after COVID-19 hit and torpedoed employment. But occupancy still hasn\u2019t come anywhere close to pre-pandemic highs, and return rates have slowed significantly. Kastle\u2019s occupancy barometer one year ago was at 47.9%, compared to 50.3% currently.<\/p>\n

Bloom also has survey data supporting his claim that the \u201creturn to the office has stalled out.\u201d His analysis shows \u201cby December 2022, 29 percent of workdays were happening from home\u201d but by July of this year \u201cwe are back up at 31 percent.\u201d This compares to estimates of around 5% to 7% of workdays at home prior to the pandemic.<\/p>\n

All of these data are best viewed for showing trends, not narrowly precise estimates or slight shifts. If the data continue to show falling WFH rates, then there may be something going on with workers going back into the office. But if the data trends remain flat or only slightly declining, as they are now, then Bloom has the better of the argument.<\/p>\n

The rise of working from home is startling. Prior to the pandemic, if you had predicted a jump in working from home that would stabilize around 25% to 30% of workdays, almost all labor economists would have been very, very skeptical.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still a lot to sort out. Not all employers have embraced WFH, even ones in the same industries. New companies and firms with large tech components seem to use it more than others, and those patterns could spread.<\/p>\n

In addition to being a first -rate analyst, Bloom is a cheerleader for working from home. He says \u201cremote work has been good for almost everyone involved\u201d and hopes we will \u201clay the five-day-office-week movement to rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, the Wharton School\u2019s Peter Cappelli sees not a win-win but an \u201cunderlying conflict\u201d around WFH\u2014employees want to work from home, but employers don\u2019t want them to. (Last year, Cappelli sardonically called working from home \u201cthe gift that keeps on giving\u201d for columnists, because \u201cwe don\u2019t really know what\u2019s going on.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Work can be cooperative, but there\u2019s also a lot of conflict between workers and employers. As Cappelli notes \u201cemployees don\u2019t get something simply because they want it, they don\u2019t all want the same thing and whether remote work is better or worse for the employer <\/em>is simply not clear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although we\u2019re seeing higher and probably more stable levels of working from home, there are many unresolved issues\u2014productivity, innovation, career pathways, gender differences, onboarding of new employees, and new forms of managerial surveillance and oversight. All of this will generate new forms of conflict if working from home stabilizes as a significant part of the labor market.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is working from home (WFH) falling, signaling that workers have to go back to the office? Or is WFH now a permanent part of future work, jobs, and careers? Well, actually both. But the future, even with higher permanent levels of WFH, remains unsettled for workers and employers. Where WFH fits into your future depends<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-30033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-taxes"},"yoast_head":"\nIs Working From Home Falling Or Stabilizing? Both. | iSafeSpend<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Is working from home (WFH) falling, signaling that workers have to go back to the office? 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