WFH triumphs over RTO: A third of Americans continue to work from home

When COVID-19 hit, many knowledge workers nationwide stayed out of the office due to health concerns. The move made a lasting mark on how much employees value working from home—enough so that many never wanted to let go of their flexibility. Thirty-four percent of them are doing “some or all” of their work at home as of last year, finds the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which looked at data from 2022. Even though that number has declined from the pandemic peak of 42% in 2020, it’s still higher than pre-pandemic levels of 24%. That’s a sign that remote work has established itself as a staple of the American workforce. 

That’s despite many executives’ attempts to issue return-to-office mandates ever since vaccines were rolled out, from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to Amazon’s Andy Jassy, who both believe their workers are more productive and collaborative in the office (studies have actually shown that many employees actually spend more time working when they’re not in the office). Their efforts have partly worked—2022’s work-from-home levels have dropped slightly from 38% in 2021, per BLS, indicating a downward trend. 

But the fact that they still exceed pre-pandemic levels signifies that some workers, eager to hold on to their pandemic autonomy, have turned a blind eye to mandates—just look at Goldman Sachs’ still partially empty offices to see that putting the hammer down on remote work hasn’t really been working. And if an office is largely empty, collaboration is difficult. 

The findings backs up countless other surveys and studies from this year. Data from WFH Research shows that 41% of workers are working from home at least part of the time. And 35% of workers with jobs that can be remote are working from home fully, according to Pew Research Center; before the pandemic, that applied to 7% of the workforce. 

It hasn’t been a straightforward road for executives, whose many attempts to get workers back to their desks have been thwarted by various COVID variants—and the realization that they hired more people during the pandemic than their office could accommodate. BLS’s data indicates that in the tug-of-war between workers and bosses, employees have kept the upper hand. 

Yet it’s a privilege that’s not evenly distributed to all; the data revealed that workers with higher levels of education were more likely to be able to work from home than those without the same credentials. A majority (54%) of workers over 25 with a bachelor’s degree or more worked at home for some days a week. That number plummets to 18% for those without a college degree. 

Women were also more likely than men to work from home, at 41% and 28% respectively. Women in general have been reported to view remote work more favorably than men do, perhaps in part because they’re often shouldering childcare tasks, which returning to the office can make more difficult. “With the recent return to in-office work for numerous employees early this year, it seems mothers were the ones to pay the price,” Jill Koziol, Motherly CEO and cofounder, told Fortune.

Of course, BLS’s data is from 2022, meaning we won’t know what this year’s work-from-home levels will look like until next year. More CEOs called for a return to office at the beginning of the year, and if the data trends are any indication, work-from-home levels will likely tick downward again. But, in the end, Jassy and the like haven’t won out yet—remote work remains a fixture of the workforce.