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.
I keep coming back to how it’s beneficial for the corporate overlords financially to not have to have massive offices, overheads, and all those in office perks. This keeps me believing WFH is the future.
Wait a moment…
“Work from home is here to stay, US data shows”
“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O”
Idiot #1 “How do you spell farm?”
Idiot #2 “E I E I O”
Fuck you. Here’s your upvote
Sounds like the making of a chant or slogan… Lol I can just imagine people protesting and shouting this in unison
I 💯 support work from home and understand it’s benefits … but at the same time, when I work from home I find myself way more depressed and less connected than when I go into the office. I enjoy my work and like my coworkers, which I know is not the case for everyone. I wish that affordable housing was pushed as a way to promote working in the office, rather than just banning WFH. It’s nice to have the choice, people should be able to afford to live near their work.
This for real. Wish commutes weren’t so god damn awful and long that in office jobs weren’t so soul sucking. Or god forbid we get compensated for our commutes or having to live closer to offices and pay exorbitant rents/taxes.
Like okay, your office is downtown in a major city. It costs $3k or some dumb shit for a studio apartment but the job only pays $80k a year and of course no overtime. So either I have to live an hour out and take a slow ass dirty train or drive in (and pay for parking too?!), or you let me work from home and I save two hours of my life per day. You as a corporation should be lobbying politically for more housing to bring down prices and providing a housing allowance or something if you want me coming in. “Nobody wants to work anymore!!” Like dude pay my rent and I’ll be in the office every day.
I think it would do me some good to have some in-person interaction, but I refuse to take a job where it’s forced upon me because it’s just too expensive to the point where even if the salary is $50k higher I don’t think I would go back to an office even on a hybrid/part-time basis. Work from home is the practical solution to this problem, because the other solutions are too radical for corporate America to try on a wider scale.
I totally think that workplaces should be required to pay for commute time. I’m curious if it’s been tried somewhere else before. It’s a long-shot at this point in time, but that doesn’t make it any less worth advocating for.
We should fine companies who don’t do work from home when they could be. It’s safer for employees and better for the planet.
Hell, take some of the money out of the highway budget, since it results in less road wear and need for additional infrastructure.
Kinda like how my power company would send me CFL and LED light bulbs for free because reducing usage was cheaper and cleaner than building a new plant.
We’re basically subsidizing this behavior with low taxes. It ought to be unaffordable to waste money on offices they don’t need.
but think of the poor landlords not getting money for renting out office space /s
Force them to justify in-office work and force an independent reassessment of that in line with other osha-style workplace safety assessments given how toxic the cube jungle is.
Oh. Right: and sexist.
Not just that, but the actual drive to work should be considered by OSHA as car accidents are one of the leading causes of death for people under age like 70
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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.
How long have you been working remote vs in office? Would be a easy win for unemployment if you worked more remotely than you did in office so the change is contradictory to your role.
Good luck, remote job postings are a hellscape. I gave up and work “hybrid” which is I can occasionally take a wfh day but I’m expected in office 5 days a week.
I hope you get a better job, and they get a worse employee in return.
I disagree completely. I think people can do some work remotely but cannot be remote all the time unfortunately. Else nobody in the company would know them and so interaction would decrease substantially over time after an initial introduction. So unless they do payroll or something where they need minimal interaction, they can’t stay at home. My neighbor works from home all the time so I’ll keep an eye out for when and if he transitions back. However, I’m loving the minimal traffic accidents and reduced traffic. So please please keep demanding work from home! Even I want to work from home every now and then.
Who the hell cares about interaction though. Why do I NEED to go into the office to see Dave from a department that I never need to interact with? As long as I can fulfill my job duties remotely, that’s all that matters. Otherwise interacting over emails / chat or audio meetings is plenty.
WfH is very similar to being a contractor in that regard. You just have to recognize that employers (who already see staff as disposable) will be extra cavalier about how they hire and fire you.
Virtual meetings, stands, and even just check ins or “coffee talk” sessions happen all the time and we’re 100% remote. Not to mention general chats via Slack or Teams with people posting memes or talking about different subjects (movies, games, etc).
Everywhere I’ve worked since college has had people working in multiple locations, so interaction via chat and voice/video call were common pre-covid anyways. The shift to remote really didn’t have any measurable impact on social stuffs aside from going out to lunch with co-workers, which still happens now, we just schedule it ahead of time.
Bullshit. I work remote 100%, and we have very good cooperation within my company and with customers. If I want to see my coworkers I simply switch to a videocall :D
At my work, where we don’t make money by just chatting, we need to be there to move the things that screw together into actual products. It’s very hard to remote that. Also for me as a research engineer, it’s very hard to figure out what when wrong with a test if I am not there to set it up and to observe it. Like I said, please keep demanding remote work though. I want to be remote when I can.
You’d be surprised, but there are so many professions in modern world that are fully digital. It’s bizarre to judge everyone based on your very little personal experience. Tune down your arrogance, these people also do actual work and produce actual products, even though they don’t screw anything together.
Varies wildly by profession. Not sure how that isn’t immediately apparent.
Else nobody in the company would know them and so interaction would decrease substantially over time after an initial introduction
Sounds like bullshit
It’s stable for now. My company has been getting people back into the office through several attempts. They haven’t given up, and they made sure to make that clear, just a work in progress.
I’m sorry to hear the Dead-Sea Effect is your bosses’ next lesson.
The fuck it is lol - almost everyone I know, who works for a large corporation in a major metropolitan area is being forced back into a hybrid role. I went from completely wfh in March of 2020 to 4 days in office since the beginning of the year (NYC). I feel like there’s a sunk cost fallacy going on with the long 20-30 year leases a lot of these companies signed for in the 2010s
You gotta remember the tape delay on moves by big corps. Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc. all are suffering after their top talent left. So they’re all slowly backpedaling their behavior.
Big Corpo always lags behind what the FAANGXRAGNAROCK tech companies do, so they’ll likely realize the same problem has happened in another couple of quarters, mimic the behavior again, and silently backpedal.
I’ve already seen more job listings claiming “hybrid/remote” and even companies like AT&T and Verizon are offering remote-only technical roles on their job sites now.
Sure would be nice if these idiot companies didn’t keep copying each other and just realized that, no, I don’t want to sit in a shitty loud hot office all day. If you want me to be productive, let me work where I am. If some people like it, cool, let them!
They should all recognize this as a cool advantage to cut down on their commercial real estate offerings, or sublet some of the space they don’t need. There’s tons of money to be had and/or saved by making these adjustments.
Thank fuck
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?
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.
I’m glad to hear. Better satellite internet seems to make it more viable, too. I didn’t have high speed internet the entire time growing up while all my friends in town had it. This up through 2007.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well then it’s good I don’t want to live in a suburb either
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.
Super insightful comment and makes complete sense, thank you.
In America I’m curious how it could impact the Electoral map (especially considering the effects of the Electoral College itself).
Great news for disabled people. Gives us a much better chance at finding a job willing to hire us!
From someone who willingly goes into the office almost every day, it’s still quite obvious that for the good of the world, the less people going in overall, the better. Better for the environment, disabled people, mental health, and I imagine better for housing markets (though I’m no economist).
Is it better for the feelings of rich people? Because that’s what’s important.
Worse for the corporate real estate investors though. And that’s why they won’t stop pushing to get people back into offices.
It is? Then why can’t I find a single work from home job that isn’t a fake listing?
A big problem is the volume of fake listings.
I literally have a company issued WFH laptop, from a company that now requires people to be in office again.
It’s not the jobs it’s the middle managers and real estate.
Found one real job this year without any problems. Maybe look worldwide? You’re not any longer bound to your city or your county when looking for 100% remote.
I had to shift this attitude myself when I started looking around this year. Was used to only look for jobs nearby to reduce commute… Bullshit. Opened up for worldwide (English is business language nearly everywhere) and now happily work remote 100%.
I wish you much success!
Good idea. Thanks for the tip.
BTW, which recruiting platform do you use? I’ve had zero luck on Indeed, LinkedIn, and Craigslist.
Onlyfans
If you’re looking for just WFH jobs, check out FlexJobs. There’s a membership fee, but because it’s oriented towards remote work and because the end users pay part of the cost, it filters out a lot of the bullshit jobs.
Man I was I was really excited for this one, given my shitty experience with job hunting in the past (as I’ve mentioned). So today I finally went to the website, filled out their survey… Got one job listing in my results, for a programming gig. Yes seriously, just one single shitty result. I don’t even know how to code. *sigh*
Thanks for trying but I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Guess I’ll just die.
Every job I have ever had off LinkedIn has been because somebody contacted me, I just sort of maintain the LinkedIn site just in case somebody decides they want to head hunt me but I don’t really consider it anything other than a passive collector of information. Certainly wouldn’t use it as my primary jump hunting site.
Also Craigslist? Unless you’re looking to be an organ donor I don’t think you’re going to have much look there
You’re not any longer bound to your city or your county
And neither are people in every other country, including low wage countries…
Scheduling alone makes it worth it to hire people in every hemisphere.
One of the vendors I used to deal with had support engineers in 4 different time zones so there would be someone on day shift no matter when they needed to deal with a problem.
That’s an incentive to hire everyone in one hemisphere, unless we’re talking about a world wide company that needs people in multiple times zones.
Every company I’ve worked with since 2007, big or small, has dealt with people in multiple time zones. Even when i was a freelancer.
Timezones and hemispheres are different things.
That’s always been the case though. He’s have always outsourced to other countries but they can’t do it completely because the quality of the work just isn’t there. Because they’re not trained.
the quality of the work just isn’t there. Because they’re not trained.
That hasn’t stopped thousands of companies from trying it, though.
Often more than once… (including the company I used to work for - they’ve outsourced, and re-homed a couple of times in the years I worked there.)
Try reading the article? They are pointing out that the percentage of people who did at least some work from home did not decrease between 2022 and 2023. This is not even full WFH. So what we see now is probably what it’s going to look like going forward.
I hate to be a dick, but if you’re struggling to find a job, and this is at all representative of your ability to do basic research, you have a glaring weakness that you can work on.
- Find companies that support wfh
- Apply directly
- ???
- Profit?
But I’ve been driving up and down all the streets and can’t find any remote offices!
The big companies fighting it and also laying off hundreds of thousands of skilled workers are in for a wakeup call in the coming decade or two. Especially given that they’re more prime targets for cyber attacks.
Something something invisible hand.
My company is making people come back to the office. Then they started laying loads of people off. Now one of our key initiatives for the year is to improve employee retention. Hmmmmmmmmm…
I wish i could continuously fuck up up, over and over and over, and still get raises, bonuses, and golden parachutes.
RTO is just being used for constructive dismissal these days.
