Remote work sticks around in ’22
Survey finds metro rates well above levels before pandemic
Even as many of America’s workers returned to the office, the share of those working from home last year remained well above what it was before the coronavirus pandemic, census data released Thursday show, reflecting a lasting change that is upending downtown districts, companies and commuting patterns.
D.C. and the Washington metro area showed some of the highest rates in the nation. Just over a third of the District’s residents (33.8%) worked from home in 2022, down from 48.3% the year before, when the city topped the list, according to the American Community Survey, conducted annually by the Census Bureau. Only Seattle had a higher share of remote workers last year among cities, at 36%.
Among metropolitan regions, the Washington area ranks fourth in the country, with just over a quarter (25.4%) of workers remote last year, down from 33.1% the previous year. That ranks it behind the Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Raleigh, N.C., metro regions and ties it with Seattle’s, according to an analysis of the data by Brookings Institution senior demographer William Frey.
Nationally, the 2022 remote work rate was 15.2%, down from 17.9% the previous year. In 2019, before the pandemic began, just 5.7% of the nation’s workers worked remotely and only 6.3% in the Washington metro area did so.
The pandemic shutdown may have led to new, and lasting, ways of thinking about work, Frey and other experts said.
“While the pandemic forced an abrupt change toward working from home, it also led to the development of new telecommuting technologies and strategies that could eliminate the need for five-day-a-week office work for many Americans,” he said.
For many, what began as an emergency measure turned into a lifestyle adjustment — and a shift in expectations. More than 60% of job seekers today say they would like to find a job that allows them to work remotely, and 20% are only looking for remote work, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, a hiring and job search site.
“Remote jobs get over three times more applications than similar non-remote jobs,” Pollak said, adding that there has been “a reshuffle as businesses clarify their remote work policies, and workers vote with their feet, sorting into the arrangements that suit them best.”
Now, she said, many new businesses are starting as “remote-first” enterprises, because of recruitment and retention benefits as well as lower start-up costs.
The work-from-home trend has persisted even as many large urban areas saw rebounds in population after emptying out during the pandemic. Census data released in March showed that 11 of the country’s 15 largest metro areas gained residents or lost fewer people compared with the previous year, including the Washington metro area, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle.
The new census data also reflect a rebound in immigration, which had plummeted during the Trump administration and the pandemic. Last year saw an increase of 912,074 foreign-born residents, up from an annual average of 186,000 in the four years prior.
The regions topping the list for remote work are hubs for high-tech industries in which working remotely is possible. The Washington metro area’s high rate is probably due to the high populations of tech workers and government employees who have been able to work remotely, Frey said.
Gotham Shankar, 32, a government consultant who lives in Foggy Bottom, said he used to work in an office with 9-to5 workdays, five days a week. Now his job has become what he described as “hybrid but optional. So you could go to work if you want to and collaborate with your colleagues, but it’s totally up to you.”
Shankar said the change has made him and his co-workers more productive. “When you go to work, you don’t get a lot of work done; it’s a lot more time spent talking to people,” he said.
His bosses have recognized the benefits of remote work, Shankar said, and pivoted to bringing staff together at happy hours and lunches rather than in the office.
“People are getting more sleep; people are getting more exercise,” he said. “People have started to realize that money is not the only component to measure success. … When you’re working from home, you get the opportunity to be successful not just at work, but also in your life.”
Some economists predict that, for a growing segment of employees, remote work is here to stay. The U.S. workfrom-home rate in 2023 has settled at about four times the 2019 level, according to a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that predicts that organizations will continue to adapt their practices to better manage hybrid and fully remote workers.
“That will raise productivity in work-from-home mode,” the paper says, and “it’s reasonable to anticipate that remote-collaboration technologies and tools will continue to advance at a rapid pace for some years to come, further reinforcing the shift to remote work.”
But D.C. may be more likely to revert to in-person work than some other places, said Erica Williams, executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
“The current reality could very well continue to shift,” she said, pointing out the city’s decline in remote work by nearly 15 percentage points from 2021.
Some people, though, are unlikely to go back. Alexis Harper, 32, of Silver Spring Md., worked fully in-person before the pandemic; last year, she took a new job as the director of communications and events for a nonprofit in the District, in part because it allowed for hybrid work.
Cutting down on commute time and coronavirus exposure were two factors, said Harper, who was working on her laptop at the Black Lion Cafe in Silver Spring on Thursday.
For jobs where most of the tasks are on a computer, remote or hybrid arrangements seem to be the norm, she said. “Among people I know, it’s more of an expectation than a perk at this point.”
For many, what began as an emergency measure turned into a lifestyle adjustment — and a shift in expectations. More than 60% of job seekers today say they would like to find a job that allows them to work remotely, and 20% are only looking for remote work, said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, a hiring and job search site.