Most employees back in the office by now
Workers in small, midsize towns returning quicker than those in large cities
The competition for parking space is getting steeper. Commutes are inching longer. Workplace lounges are filling up with commotion as junior associates play cornhole. What returnto-office debate? In some parts of the country, it has been settled.
“I know almost nobody in Columbus who is fully remote,” said Grant Blosser, 35, who works at a financial services firm.
In October 2020, Blosser started going back into his office in Columbus, Ohio, five days a week. He cracked jokes with the young analysts, one of whom recently dragged his team to hot yoga (it “kicked our butts”). He listened to his book club’s selection in the car (a biography of Winston Churchill).
It was a relief, he said, to feel the “separation of church and state” that came from leaving the house each day.
“Almost everybody I know is in an office most of the time here,” he said. “The headlines that I read about as far as people dragging their feet going back to the office are about select companies and select cities.”
More than two years into the pandemic, American corporate workplaces have splintered. Some are nearly as full as they were before COVID-19 struck; others sit abandoned, printers switched off and Keurig cups collecting dust. Workers in America’s midsize and small cities have returned to the office in far greater numbers than those in the biggest U.S. cities. Some executives in large cities are hoping they’ll catch up, though they’ve been impeded by safety and health concerns about mass transit commutes as well as competitive job markets where employees are more likely to call the shots.
In small cities — those with populations under 300,000 — the share of paid, full days worked from home dropped to 27 percent this spring from around 42 percent in October 2020. In the 10 largest U.S. cities, days worked from home shifted to roughly 38 percent from 50 percent in that same period, according to a team of researchers at Stanford and other institutions led by economists Steven Davis, Nick Bloom and Jose Maria Barrero.
Offices have filled back up fastest in areas where COVID-19 lockdowns were shortest and where commutes are done by car, according to Davis. Many cities in California and New York, in particular, have been slower to return to the office than those in Florida and Texas.
“‘Strange’ is one word. ‘Jealousy’ is also one,” said Bret Hairston, an office worker in Columbus, describing her feelings about going into an office regularly while she knew many people were not.
While some company executives have found themselves embroiled in tense discussion about the future of the office, others are adamant that, at least for them, the debate is resolved. “In some ways, it’s a nonstory,” said Matt Lanter, 33, co-founder of OpenStore, an e-commerce company in Miami whose 100 workers are in the office full-time. “There’s nothing really to talk about because people have literally been in the office for the last one to two years.”
It is not that civic leaders everywhere don’t want people back. It is just that their pitches are getting mixed results. “Downtown is back,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said this spring. “Back to work, back to fun.”
Mayor Eric Adams told New Yorkers, “You can’t stay home in your pajamas.” Yet many of them have.
The regional gap in return-to-office patterns is discernible in the share of online job postings that permit remote work.
In San Francisco, 26 percent of job postings now allow for remote work, and, in New York, 19 percent do. In Columbus, just 13 percent of job postings permit remote work; in Houston, the number is 12.6 percent; and in Birmingham, Ala., it is just 10.4 percent, according to another team of researchers led by Davis, Bloom and Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School.
Some workers are straddling the line between these two Americas. Ann Aly, who several years ago moved back from Alexandria, Va., to her hometown near Fort Myers, Fla., is the only person she knows there who works remotely. She avoids driving anywhere between 7 and 9:30 a.m. because the waves of commuters make for interminable traffic. In the afternoons, she stops by the grocery store where she used to be a cashier, taking advantage of the short lines while others are at work.
“A lot of people don’t really understand how that works: How do you work remote? What do you do? And how do you not just take a nap in the middle of the day?” said Aly, who works in tech. “I don’t really talk about it with neighbors unless they ask because I don’t necessarily want to highlight those social differences.”
Some researchers worry that different expectations about workplace flexibility make for one more way that people’s lives have become polarized during the pandemic.
“One of the things that tethers us is having to go into work,” said Bloom, a professor at Stanford who studies hybrid work, explaining that for some people workplaces no longer serve as a social anchor. “Half the country has a different experience than the other.”