Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor of economics, wrote the following opinion piece in The New York Times on why a return to the in-office five-day workweek is dead.

“Working from home is here to stay. I can prove it with data — lots and lots of data showing that returning to the office (RTO) is DOA.

A telling data point is the number tracking how many Americans swiped and tapped electronic cards to gain entry into their offices. This month, occupancy rates were at 50 percent of February 2020 levels. That is shocking — only half as many days are spent in the office compared with prepandemic times.

That number has flatlined not only in office buildings in San Francisco and New York but also in workplaces in Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; and Philadelphia. Blue and red, inland and coastal, Northern and Southern workers who might have disagreed on pandemic-related behaviors like mask wearing and vaccine boosters have quietly united behind work-from-home habits throughout 2023.

Work-from-home levels aren’t as high as they were during the pandemic’s first peak in early 2020, when 62 percent of full-day paid work happened at home. People did begin filtering back to the office as the pandemic waned. But they did so only to a point: By December 2022, 29 percent of workdays were happening from home. There was a slight dip after the winter holidays to 27 percent in January 2023. But as of July, we’re back up at 31 percent.

Why have the return-to-office maximalists lost? There seemed to be so much excitement and pent-up demand from people who wanted to leave their kitchen tables for ergonomically better office desks. There was. They just didn’t want to go in all the time.

Hybrid work arrangements have killed the return-to-office hype. Employees equate a mix of working in the office and working from home to an 8 percent raise. They don’t have to deal with the daily hassle and costs of a commute. In fact, the process of getting to work is more despised by employees than the need to actually work.

And, at the end of the day, despite all the noise some business executives made to the contrary, remote work saves firms money. It cuts overhead, boosts productivity and is profitable. And what is profitable in a capitalist economy sticks. Thankfully, remote work also has major benefits for society, including improving the climate by cutting billions of miles of weekly commuting and supporting families by liberating parents’ time. We all should celebrate the resilience of our workers and the benefits of working from home.”

For the rest of the piece, visit The New York Times here.