Home Depot, Instagram, Fidelity, and TikTok are just a few of the companies that have recently ordered their employees back to the office five days a week, part of a broader shift toward stricter return-to-office mandates. Such policies cut down on working from home, yet they don’t always cut down on remote work. Many employees now commute to the office only to spend each day on video calls with colleagues who are elsewhere, or even down the hall. They’re in the office but still working remotely.
We are two economists who have spent years studying how remote work shapes learning, productivity, happiness, and career progression. We have been struck by how often people picture the alternative to working from home as an office where nearly everyone is together. The modern office looks very different from that ideal. Today, the alternative to working from home is often working in a sea of mostly empty cubicles.
In a September survey of 1,835 college-educated American workers, we found that, on their most recent day at the office, more than 70 percent of respondents had at least one member of their team who was not in the building with them. As a result, roughly half of respondents had no fully in-person meetings. And more than a third had exclusively online meetings because their teams moved meetings entirely online whenever anyone was remote. For these workers, the commute to the office buys little more than a different background on their video calls.
The commute is costly. The typical American spends 54 minutes getting to and from work in a day, which they rank among their most hated activities. Yet when colleagues are actually together, this commute can be worth it.
[Stephanie H. Murray: “Commuting is bad”—particularly for women]
In-person connection often unlocks the best parts of work. It sparks creativity; in an experiment published in Nature, pairs who brainstormed in person came up with about 14 percent more ideas than those brainstorming online. Face-to-face work also boosts mentorship, increasing the comments that people receive on their work by about 20 percent. Perhaps as a result, people consistently do better work when face-to-face with their colleagues and rate this work as more meaningful than work done alone.
But these benefits are fragile. In our research, we find that having just one distant teammate weakens the connections among those sitting side by side, as team meetings move partially or fully online. Thus, any exposure to remote work in the office eliminates many benefits of the commute.
Working remotely from the office has become so common because we have yet to shed two remnants of the pandemic era. The first is sprawl: Teams stretch across multiple locations. A typical team might have, say, a few employees who work in the same city, a couple who are fully remote, and one who works in a satellite office far away. So even if every teammate were in their office, the team meeting would still be largely online.
During the lockdown, distance didn’t matter for jobs that could be done over Zoom. Many companies hired people far from their team’s central hub, and allowed existing employees to move farther away. In our analysis of data from one Fortune 500 firm, about 60 percent of corporate employees had at least one distant teammate after the pandemic, up from 20 percent before. Among small businesses, the distance between employees and the central office nearly tripled from 2019 to 2023, driven in large part by employees who live too far away to regularly commute to work.
Many companies have simply accepted this geographic sprawl. If a team is already dispersed, managers may see nothing wrong with hiring a candidate in Detroit even though the team’s center of gravity is in Denver. Our analysis finds that job posts among Fortune 500 firms now list multiple possible office locations five times as often as a decade ago.
Bad habits are another remnant of the lockdown. During COVID, many workers became accustomed to focusing on their own to-do list and churning through more tasks in less time. Now many still view in-office interactions with colleagues as distractions from their work. As they see it, going to the office means they spend time commuting just to lose more time chatting. That view misses the potential for these conversations to spark new ideas, propel others’ growth, and improve the quality of their work.
Consequently, many stay home as much as they can get away with. Our analysis finds that the typical worker commutes in one fewer day than companies require: Ask for four and you get three. This might not sound like such a big deal, but on any given day, someone is likely staying home and causing their on-site peers to be on Zoom calls.
When one person fails to show up, the office has less of a draw for the rest of the team. This is especially true for managers; if the leader stays home, the rank and file often follow suit. Pretty quickly, the people who initially followed the rules start to skip the commute too.
Even when people do go into the office, many send out Teams or Zoom links rather than moseying over to a conference room. On their most recent day in the office, 52 percent of workers with meetings had at least one held online even though all the participants were in the same building. Skipping the schlep to the conference room can feel efficient. But this convenience cuts out the small moments that create deeper connections: the chat before the meeting starts, the debrief on the way back to your desk.
Rolling back this trend of working remotely from the office feels Sisyphean. Reuniting colleagues who have scattered to the four corners of a Zoom screen seems impossible. And showing up in a conference room feels pointless when the other participants are a few doors down on their laptop. Mandating more time in an office has neither ensured that colleagues go to the same office nor that they meet in person rather than online. The result is that bringing people back to the office often relocates—rather than reduces—remote work.
But an isolated workday doesn’t have to be the new norm. Companies could regather teams, by paying remote workers to relocate and refocusing hiring on each team’s central hub. When recongregating is impractical, they could hold regular off-sites. Companies could revamp performance reviews to reward the things that happen best in person: the creative breakthroughs, the mentorship moments. That way, conversations with co-workers would feel like essential parts of work rather than distractions from the solo tasks that people could do faster from home. Not every workday has to be in the office. But ensuring that in-office days are in-person days could make work feel more human.
© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
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