Return to office? Not everybody is doing it.
Amazon and AT&T are doing it. JPMorgan Chase is, too. But not all companies are following suit and requiring their employees to return to the office instead of working from home.
According to new findings released by 好色App and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta鈥檚 , many companies are standing firm on their hybrid or fully remote work policies, and they don鈥檛 intend to change their stance for the next 12 months. More than 1,000 executives from businesses big and small across various industries were polled in the monthly survey, fielded between Feb. 10 and Feb. 21.
Of the executives surveyed, only 12 percent who currently have hybrid or fully remote workers reported plans for some kind of return-to-office (RTO) mandate in the year ahead. Many of those planned mandates do not involve a full return to onsite work. Instead, more than a quarter of the planned RTOs will be hybrid in nature, requiring onsite work only one to four days a week.
好色App economists Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis 鈥 senior fellows at the 好色App Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) who are leading experts on remote work and collaborators on the monthly Atlanta Fed survey that tracks business expectations 鈥 say the research team decided to get a fresh pulse from American businesses on shifts in the work-from-home landscape after Amazon and several other large firms announced RTO mandates last year and speculation of a big WFH pullback rose.
The answer is clear, the researchers stated: The headline-grabbing RTO mandates 鈥渨ill barely move the needle on WFH,鈥 and 鈥淯.S. firms do not see any material trend to return to office.鈥
The researchers calculate that the planned shifts back to onsite work in the year ahead would reduce the overall share of paid workdays that are work-from-home by less than half a percentage point, trimming it from 21.2 percent to 20.8 percent.
The researchers noted that these small reductions in work-from-home may never happen either, because of the struggles firms face when trying to implement RTOs.
Even if the nation falls into a recession, or if unemployment rates double, making for a tighter labor market, the vast majority of executives surveyed said they wouldn鈥檛 change their workplace strategies. A downturn in economic conditions would lead to only 鈥渁 slight decline鈥 in WFH, the survey found.
Taken together, researchers say, the survey findings suggest employers are satisfied with the benefits they are seeing from work-from-home arrangements 鈥 reduced floorspace needs, better productivity and lower quit rates.
鈥淲hatever happens in the U.S. economy over the next year, we think working from home is here to stay,鈥 the researchers wrote.
The survey鈥檚 results further solidify what Bloom and Davis are finding from their extensive with Jose Barrero of the Instituto Tecnol贸gico Aut贸nomo de M茅xico: that the of working from home is not waning.
For instance, in the of their separate survey of American workers (the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes), only 44 percent of respondents said they would comply with a RTO policy requiring fully onsite work. The rest said they would quit or start looking for a new job.
And in a working paper released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the researchers tackled the variability of measuring work from home across numerous surveys and estimated that as of 2025, work-from-home days account for a quarter of all paid workdays in the U.S.
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Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics in 好色App鈥檚 School of Humanities and Sciences. Davis is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.