For the first time since the pandemic, Americans prefer hybrid over remote work—and it’s not the free lunches driving the shift
Employers have tried a throw-spaghetti-at-a-wall approach to get their workers back in the office after years of remote work, from threatening to withhold promotions unless employees show up to the office to putting beers on tap only steps away from cubicles.
These pleas have not always been well-received by employees, who have called sudden return-to-office mandates “betrayals,” saying it is unreasonable to go back to in-person work after being allowed to work at home for so long. But the angry calls for a remote-work rebellion are showing signs of quieting, a Morning Consult report from this month found.
For the first time since the pandemic began, more workers are saying they prefer hybrid work to working completely remote. The survey, conducted in January, found that among 6,625 U.S. adults—3,389 of whom were employed—23% said they would prefer to do most of their work remotely, compared to 27% who responded the same way in 2023. Meanwhile, 29% reported they preferred hybrid work, up from 25% the year before. The number of employees who preferred to work in person most of the time (46%) did not change.
Not only is hybrid work now an appealing prospect for employees, but it makes them better workers, Morning Consult found. While employee engagement fell among both remote and in-person workers—as well as employed Americans as a whole—hybrid workers were the only cohort to report greater engagement over last year, with a 4% uptick to 92%.
The positive attitudes toward hybrid work come amid a turning point for work culture in the U.S. Remote work opportunities are changing with the times. As of February, only 11.5% of office jobs were fully remote. That’s down from over 61% in pandemic-era 2020, according to British telecom firm Ringover. And as the work landscape shifts, so, too, are employees’ feelings toward it.
“Four years ago, companies and workers were breathlessly talking about how remote work was the future,” Amy He, Morning Consult’s head of industry analysis and report author, told Fortune. “Now, four years later, companies and workers are kind of switching their tune a little bit.”
Superficial perks aren’t cutting it
But according to He, while employers are offering back-to-work perks to lure their workers into the office, it’s not necessarily the driving factor in employees’ change of heart.
“Getting free lunches and dinners—it’s nice, but it’s also smaller compared to the actual bigger costs and more importantly, the immovable costs, that come with having to go back to the office,” she said.
Employees are more concerned with employers addressing childcare and commuting, with 55% of respondents to Morning Consult’s survey saying that an employer paying for childcare was probably or definitely a factor in deciding to work in person more. Team lunches and working alongside colleagues were the lowest-ranked motivators for returning to the office, though 50% and 42% of respondents, respectively, still said they were probably or definitely important to in-person work.
Indeed, workers are more interested in letting money talk. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom told the Wall Street Journal in August that workplace flexibility was worth the equivalent of an 8% pay raise. Largely thanks to inflation, day care costs have risen 36% in the past decade, a statistic of growing concern thanks to the COVID baby boom. Commuting is over $2,000 more expensive and takes 39 hours longer per year than it did before the pandemic as workers moved farther away from the office, making it harder for employers to sweeten the pot for their employees.
So why are workers willing to surmount these obstacles? The reason is a lot less sexy than perks or promotions, He argued. With 90% of companies planning to ask employees to return to the office in some capacity by the end of 2024, according to Resume Builder, workers just don’t really have a choice in the matter—many have just stopped resisting the change.
It’s not as bad as it sounds, He said. As workers return to the office, even if reluctantly at first, they’re realizing that flexibility can take different forms. Maybe it means an easier commute to the gym after work or forming new habits that are actually better than working entirely from home.
“People in general are pretty adaptable,” she said.
