With all this in mind, it may not be surprising to learn that loyal pro-office bosses are winning and that remote jobs are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
Ringover, a British telecommunications company specializing in cloud-based software, analyzed remote work policy changes between 2020 and 2023 at the 100 largest U.S. companies for a report titled “Remote Work Rug Pull.” What they found doesn’t bode well for workers who have grown accustomed to the assumption that their remote setup is here to stay.
Overall, office days at major American companies grew from 1.1 days per week on average in 2021 to 3.4 days in 2023. Even worse news: The U.S. lags behind its major competitors when it comes to remote work: Only 11.5% of its office roles are fully remote. This is a real fall from grace for a country that, in 2020, was a world leader in remote working rates, with 61.5% of jobs fully remote.
Naturally, employees at the top and lower levels of the chain of command feel this fear: Nearly 4 in 5 workers (78%) surveyed by Ringover in December 2023 admitted to worrying about potential RTO obligations in the workplace. They would be almost universally unpopular; Over two-thirds (67%) of respondents said they still want some amount of remote working, even though many of their companies have taken steps to eliminate this option.
For the report, Ringover manually analyzed remote work policies at America’s 100 largest companies, then pored over data from WFH Research’s Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) to break down those policies by industry. (SWAA interviews between 2,500 and 10,000 U.S. workers each month.) So she conducted her own research, questioning a sample of 1,101 U.S. adults about their work-related opinions and preferences: 60% of that group is fully remote, 27% is fully in-person, and the remaining 13% is hybrid.
The discoveries? The decision to formally mandate any amount of in-person work is probably a bad deal. Hardly loyal to the company, nearly two-thirds of Ringover’s respondents said they would also accept a lower salary to continue working remotely. (A similar percentage of respondents said the same thing in October during a FlexJobs survey.) All remote jobs should be a priority, 85% of Ringover respondents said.
Maybe these statistics and feelings aren’t so surprising; business today is almost unrecognizable from the pandemic era, when nearly everyone assumed the shift to working from home would be temporary. Then, of course, companies realized that people were just as productive, if not more so, and that financial results remained just as healthy, if not healthier.
Software heavyweights who, in another life, expounded on the benefits of distributed work, have backtracked significantly on their policies. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple had higher-than-average office work rates last year: 2.7 days a week, according to Ringover’s calculations.
For some bosses, even 2.7 days spent in the office, or just over 50% of the week, does not seem to be enough. Overall, companies enforcing RTO mandates have become more stringent, Ringover found. They now require an average of 3.4 days a week in the office, up from 2.1 in 2022.
For what? “The idea that if you involve everyone it’s mandatory [office] environment, working side by side, magical results will come — that’s silly,” said Annie Dean, who leads distributed work planning at software company Atlassian, on a panel last fall. “It seems like magical thinking.”
Then there’s the fact that in most industries, remote jobs aren’t an option at all. Ringover found that the share of remote jobs grew in just four industries after the pandemic: hospitality, healthcare, utilities and (most importantly) information. This certainly falls short of the consistently huge number of workers across the economy who are desperate for remote jobs.
The never-ending tension between the desires of bosses and what workers are willing to do “will likely define the debate about the future of work for years to come,” Ringover wrote. This, of course, presupposes that both sides are open to compromise.