The Rise of In-Office Remote Work

Home Depot, Instagram, Fidelity, and TikTok are just a few of the companies that have recently ordered their employees back to the office five days a week, part of a broader shift toward stricter return-to-office mandates.

Such policies cut down on working from home, yet they don’t always cut down on remote work.

Many employees now commute to the office only to spend each day on video calls with colleagues who are elsewhere, or even down the hall.

They’re in the office but still working remotely.

We are two economists who have spent years studying how remote work shapes learning, productivity, happiness, and career progression.

We have been struck by how often people picture the alternative to working from home as an office where nearly everyone is together.

The modern office looks very different from that ideal.

Today, the alternative to working from home is often working in a sea of mostly empty cubicles.

In a September survey of 1,835 college-educated American workers, we found that, on their most recent day at the office, more than 70 percent of respondents had at least one member of their team who was not in the building with them.

As a result, roughly half of respondents had no fully in-person meetings.

And more than a third had exclusively online meetings because their teams moved meetings entirely online whenever anyone was remote.

For these workers, the commute to the office buys little more than a different background on their video calls.

The commute is costly.

The typical American spends 54 minutes getting to and from work in a day, which they rank among their most hated activities.