Work from home (WFH) has been around for decades. The share of people working from home three or more days per week was under 1% in 1980, growing modestly with the rise of the Internet to around 2.4% in 2010 and 4% in 2018. Then came Covid-19, forcing tens of millions around the world to work from home and triggering a mass workplace experiment that broke through the technological and cultural barriers that had prevented WFH adoption in the past.
Since May of 2020, economists Jose Maria Barrero (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México), Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University), and Stephen J. Davis (University of Chicago) have been conducting monthly surveys to track the evolution of WFH. Their surveys ask questions about working arrangements during the pandemic, as well as about worker preferences and employer plans post-pandemic. Typical respondent are 40 to 50 years old, have one to three years of college, and earned $40 to $50 thousand in 2019.
I’ve been tracking the evolution of WFH by following their monthly surveys. One of their first surveys found that the percentage of paid full days worked from home once COVID hit in April of 2020 was 61.4%, a huge increase from their 4.8% WFH estimate just before COVID. The percentage then started to decline in subsequent months. One year later WFH was around 45%.
In an April 2021 working paper, “Why Working from Home Will Stick,” Barrero, Bloom, and Davis predicted that the shift to work from home would be one of the biggest legacies of the pandemic. They projected that “American workers will supply about 20 percent of full workdays from home in the post-pandemic economy, four times the pre-COVID level. Desires to work from home part of the week are pervasive across groups defined by age, education, gender, earnings, and family circumstances.” They estimated that higher levels of WFH would boost productivity by about 4.6%, with over half of the productivity gain reflecting the WFH savings in commuting time.
Their latest survey, published in March 2025, included updates up to February 2025. As I’ve been doing from time to time, most recently in May 2024, let me summarize some of their key findings.
- In February of 2025, about 26% of full paid days (6 or more hours) were WFH. For the past three years the percentage of WFH days for all workers has fluctuated between 25% and 30%.
- Post-pandemic, workers able to work from home would like to do so around 2.9 days per week, whereas employer plans for workers able to work from home post-pandemic are 2.3 days for week, a difference of roughly 0.6 days.
- In early 2025, 61.4% of all full-time employees were full-time onsite; 12.9% were fully remote; and 25.7% were in a hybrid arrangement.
- For employees that can work from home, the most common arrangement was hybrid, 43.8%; fully onsite 34.1% fully onsite; and fully remote 22.0%.
Let me now discuss a different set of surveys.
“Remote work has undergone significant changes over the years,” noted “The Great Office Return—Will 2025 Be The End Of Remote Work?,” a December 2024 article in Forbes. “There are so many conflicting ideas regarding remote work which make this an ongoing workplace debate, and the news regarding big-name companies like Amazon and Dell mandating five-days-a-week RTO in 2024 leaves many scratching their heads and concerned about where they might end up working in 2025 and beyond.”
The Forbes article cites the FlexIndex surveys, which collects office requirements information from more that 13,000 companies, that have over 100,000 office locations and employ more than 120 million people worldwide. FlexIndex publishes the latest trends on flexible work in their quarterly reports.
Their most recent Q4 2024 Flex Report uncovered noteworthy insights on how the concept of remote work is changing, and what we can expect for 2025.
“And you thought return to office policy was settled!,” said the latest Flex report. “For a while, it looked like 2-3 days per week in the office would be the future of work in America. Yet this quarter has brought significant changes to the landscape. Major companies like Amazon, Dell, and The Washington Post announced their plans for a full return to office. Then came a shift in the political atmosphere, with Trump’s victory and potential incoming changes requiring full-time office work for government employees. These developments raise important questions about where workplace flexibility is headed.”
“Are we witnessing the beginning of a broader shift back to Full Time In Office?,” asked the Q4 report. “Is the era of fully flexible work coming to an end? Or is this simply another evolution in how companies structure their workplace policies?” In answer to these questions, the report cites five key findings:
- 68% of US firms offer work location flexibility. The percentage of US firms requiring Full Time In Office is 32%, roughly flat over the last two quarters despite some high profile company shifts toward Full Time In Office.
- Structured Hybrid models continue to grow in popularity. 43% of US firms now have a Structured Hybrid model, that is, the company has specific requirements for when employees need to come in physically to work That’s up from 38% in Q3 2024 and 20% in Q1 2023. Fully Flexible decreased in popularity quarter over quarter (25% vs. 29%).
- The average required time in office per week increased quarter over quarter. US firms now require an average of 2.78 days per week in the office, up from 2.63 days a quarter ago and 2.49 days two quarters ago. That shift is heavily driven by an increase in the percentage of companies requiring three days per week in office (19% to 28% over the last two quarters).
- Financial Services climbs back into the top five most flexible industries. Tech, Insurance, and Financial Services are the three most flexible industries. Restaurants & Food Services continues to be the most common requirer of Full Time In Office, followed by Education.
- Small firms embrace Fully Flexible models, while large firms opt for Structured Hybrid arrangements. 73% of US firms with 25,000+ employees are Structured Hybrid, compared to 15% of firms with 500 employees or less. Conversely, 70% of US firms with 500 employees or less are Fully Flexible, compared to just 14% of firms with 25,000+ employees.
What can we expect in 2025? According to the Flex Q4 report, although a few large US companies and government departments are now requiring a return to full time in office, the vast majority still offer work location flexibility. “Only 32% of US firms require Full Time In Office for corporate employees, roughly flat over the last two quarters.”
However, it’s clear that fully flexible models are becoming less popular. Fully flexible models were offered by 31% of US firms in Q1 2023, and have since been steadily decreasing to 25% of firms now. And full time in office requirements have also decreased from 49% in early 2023 to 32% in 4Q 2024
At the same time, structured hybrid models, — where companies set specific expectations for when employees must work from an office, — have been rapidly increasing, from 20% of firms in Q1 2023 to 43% of firms now. US firms now expect that their employees will spend 2.78 days per week in the office on average, ranging from 2% requiring 1 day per week, 3% requiring 4 days, 10% requiring 2 days, and 28% requiring 3 days per week.
“2025 promises to be a fascinating year for work location flexibility!,” said the Flex Q4 report in closing. “Will the US shift more toward Full Time In Office? Or will Structured Hybrid become increasingly dominant as the preferred work model?”
What is the likely future of WFH?
Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom addressed this question in an August 2023 essay in The Economist.
“The media are full of stories of how firms from Amazon to Zoom are dragging their employees back into the office. So is working from home (WFH) over? Was this simply a pandemic-era remote-work boom extended by tight labour markets?”
“No. I believe that, having stabilized, WFH will soon start growing again. Remote working is set to undergo a Nike swoosh, with an initial post-pandemic drop, followed by its current stabilization and a future long-run surge.”
“Overall, about 20% of all days are now worked from home. Looking ahead, two powerful economic forces will drive WFH up, perhaps to 30% of days worked a decade from now.”
The first is improving technology. “In 1965 just 0.4% of days were worked from home in America. The share then doubled roughly every 15 years until 2019, driven by technological advances. These included the personal computer in the 1980s, the spread of laptops in the 1990s, the explosion of the internet in the 2000s and most recently cloud file-sharing and video calls. These technologies made it easier to work remotely.”
The second force is so called cohort effects. “Data show that younger startups tend to be more remote-focused. These firms have been born in an era when having an office is optional and meeting customers and business partners online is standard. Many see forgoing offices and using more remote workers as a key cost-saving strategy. As a result, employees at today’s new firms work almost twice as many days from home as those at firms founded 30 years ago.”
“This shift to hybrid working has been perhaps the most radical change to office life since the introduction of the computer,” said professor Bloom. “A decade from now my Stanford students may look back to the pre-pandemic norm of five-day weeks in the office the same way we marvel at old photographs of besuited office workers bashing away on typewriters: quaint, puzzling and something that feels like a bygone era.”
On the other hand, a set of economic forces are having a big impact on the evolution of work.
“On the surface, the job market looks as strong as ever,” said the WSJ in a recent article, “Balance of Power Shifts Back Toward Bosses.” “Beneath the surface, workers are getting a very different message: Their bosses are back in command. Big companies are tightening remote-work policies, shrinking travel budgets and cutting back on benefits.”
“With labor market less tight, workers face return-to-office mandates, smaller bonuses, and no more pet sick days,” the article added. “From 2020 to 2022, pandemic labor shortages pushed wages up sharply, and those who left one job could easily find another. The rate at which workers quit surged, and unemployment fell in early 2023 to 3.4%, the lowest in more than 50 years. Unemployment has since risen to 4.1% in December. Meanwhile, the ratio of vacant jobs to jobless workers has fallen from a record of 2 in 2022 to 1.1 in November.”
“Office work is not all the way back to what it once was, but the trend is moving in one direction with disorienting speed,” noted a March 20 NY Magazine article. C-suite executives are feeling emboldened to bark: Get back to work! “And they are sending messages that they really mean it this time. … Workers can complain — and they do, loudly — but the hard truth is, they have little room to resist the reversal. Now that the job market has cooled and a recession is looming, power has shifted back to employers, who are showing who’s boss.”
A discussion I’ve been having over the past couple days at an event relates to the challenges of mentorship and casual interactions with fully remote. It can be done but I look back at my own career and I see issues, especially for people who don’t have (or make) a lot of opportunities to physically interact outside of an office.
Posted by: Gordon Haff | March 29, 2025 at 02:52 AM
Gordon, I totally agree with your comments. This is a particular problem with being fully remote. Some kind of Structured Hybrid should do, when the the office agrees that everyone should be in the office a a specific set of days per week.
Posted by: Irving Wladawsky-Berger | March 29, 2025 at 06:09 AM