Is this the beginning of the end for work-from-home?

It has been an accepted “fact” that staff want to work from home – and that in today’s tough talent market we, as employers, have had to bend to that wish. But as time has gone on, and questions arise as to just how productive our staff are when away, so some big names have started insisting that staff return (at least some of the time) to the office.

Take Apple for example – in June last year CEO Tim Cook called remote working “The mother of all experiments.” Now, it looks like that experiment may be coming to a close. For a while the global tech giant has been pushing staff to attend the office at least three days a week, and just last week news broke that it was starting to track employee badges and giving escalating warnings to those not attending the workplace.

NEW: Apple is tracking employee attendance (via badge records) and will give employees escalating warnings if they don't come in 3x per week.

ALSO: Elon Musk sent Twitter employees an email at 2:30am saying the "office is not optional" and noting SF was half empty yesterday.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) March 22, 2023

This year fellow tech giants Google, Tesla, Twitter and Amazon are also requiring attendance at the office. “When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to employees in an internal blog. Desk-based workers will have to return to the office at least three days a week from May 1 this year.

And after years of working from home due to the pandemic, the US Government’s own figures show that remote work is becoming less common in the United States. According to a report released by the Labor Department last week, 72.5% of business establishments reported that their employees rarely or never teleworked in 2022, up from 60.1% the previous year. The survey also revealed that around 21 million more workers were on-site full-time in 2022 than in the prior year.

Key Bureau of Labor Statistics Findings;

In August and September 2022, 27.5 percent of private-sector establishments (2.5 million) had employees teleworking some or all the time. July to September 2021 figures were 60.1 percent.

• Information services 67.4%
• Professional and business services 49%
• Education 46%
• Wholesale trade 39%

In August and September 2022, 27.5 percent of private-sector establishments (2.5 million) had employees teleworking some or all the time. 29.8 percent in 2021. 95.1% expect telework levels to remain the same for the next 6 months.

This trend marks a significant shift from the peak of the pandemic, when millions of Americans decamped from their offices and worksites to their basements and bedrooms to work remotely. Interestingly, the Labor Department found that the current figure is close to the percentage of establishments (76.7%) that had no remote workers before the pandemic hit and were open in February 2020.

In a Robert Half survey last year, 66% of managers wanted staff back on-site full time. The same survey, though, found that 50% of workers would quit and find a new job rather than be forced back to the office.

And while the great talent shortage does mean that your workers have a lot of power in the “where should I work” discussion, the mood is changing as we face a looming recession, and increased pressure for productivity and workforce reductions.

So which states have embraced work from home?

Percentage of respondents by state in which private companies rarely (or never) allow work from home

The same data by industry rather than state has no major surprises – hands on jobs, require hands to, well, be on as it were.