American work-from-home rates drop to lowest since the pandemic
The push by employers to get American workers back into the office appears to be working.
Fewer than 26 per cent of US households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week, a sharp decline from the early-2021 peak of 37 per cent, according to the two latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Surveys. Only seven states plus the city of Washington have a remote-work rate above 33 per cent, the data shows, down from 31 states and DC mid-pandemic.
Employees’ demand for remote jobs is outpacing the number of companies offering them. Bloomberg
The reversal reflects the continued push by many employers to get staff to return to offices. Remote employees have been blamed for dwindling profits and costing cities billions, and fears of a recession have eroded their ability to demand the telework perks they won early in the pandemic, when the labour market sat squarely in their favour. Some companies, such as Goldman Sachs Group, expect a return to five days in the office, although boardroom disagreement abounds – almost three out of four organisations see returning to the office as the topic most likely to foment leadership conflict.
At the state level, the data shows all 50 have had work-from-home rates drop from their pandemic highs. But the unevenness in their rates of decline suggests the trend does not have one cohesive explanation, and is instead the result of a hodgepodge of migration, socio-economic, gender and race factors, and possibly even politics – Democrat states tend to have higher remote-work rates than Republican ones.
Illustrating the complexity: states whose remote-work rates have fallen by as much as half to around post-pandemic lows include Mississippi and Louisiana, which were unable to widely embrace remote work because of a reliance on in-person industries such as manufacturing and oil and gas, but also more white-collar states that did welcome it, such as California and Connecticut.
New York City workers fled during the pandemic to towns such as Greenwich, Connecticut, driving a boom in home sales and remote-work rates. They might not be moving back now, but they are commuting to the city. As Connecticut’s work-from-home rate has fallen – to 28 per cent from its early-2021 peak of 46 per cent – average travel along the Metro-North train lines that link the state to New York City and its offices has risen to a peak of about 70 per cent versus pre-pandemic levels, up from just 20 per cent in early 2021.
“People exited New York City, they’re not selling their homes to go back,” Bill Raveis, founder of Connecticut-based William Raveis Real Estate, said. “They’re staying here and they’re making their adjustments to the community.”
Worker bonuses
The latest Census data also underlines that employees’ demand for remote jobs is outpacing the number of companies offering them. In 157 of the largest metro areas in the US, more than half of job applications in August were for fully remote or hybrid roles, according to LinkedIn data generated for Bloomberg, but postings for those jobs have been falling since early last year, data from recruitment site Indeed shows.
In Colorado, widely seen as a work-from-home haven and one of the few states that has maintained a rate above one third, 76 per cent of job applications in Colorado Springs were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, the LinkedIn data showed.
Some areas are capitalising on that scarcity. Alabama, with a work-from-home rate of just 15 per cent according to the Pulse data, offers $US10,000 ($16,000) to remote workers who move to the state’s north-west Shoals area. The program has attracted about the same number of applications so far this year as in all of 2021 and 2022 combined, about 3400.
All 50 states pale in comparison to their largest cities’ metro areas. In Washington, where government bureaucrats are loath to go back to their offices, the remote-work rate is above 50 per cent, the data shows. Similarly, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco all had rates near or above 40 per cent.
Average office attendance across 10 big US cities remains about 50 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, according to security firm Kastle Systems International, no higher than where it was early this year.
Bloomberg
Bloomberg
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