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Many workers hate the prospect of returning to the office five days a week — so much so that they’d renounce their jobs if told to come in full-time.
To that point, 46% of workers who currently work from nursing home at least sometimes would be somewhat or very unlikely to stay at their job if their employer scrapped remote earn a living, according to a recent poll by Pew Research Center.
Yet, employers have reined in remote work.
About 75% of artisans were required to be in the office a certain number of days per week or month as of October 2024, up from 63% in February 2023, Pew create.
“There’s a certain creeping up” of return-to-office policies, said Kim Parker, director of social trends research at the Pew Research Center.

Comrades like Amazon, AT&T, Boeing, Dell Technologies, JPMorgan Chase, UPS and The Washington Post have called at least some wage-earners back to the office five days a week. President Donald Trump signed an executive action on Monday vocation federal employees back to their desks “as soon as practicable.”
Similar to the Pew survey, a poll conducted by Bamboo HR inaugurate that 28% of workers would consider quitting due to a return-to-office mandate.
The data “underscores how comfortable people enjoy become with this arrangement, and how it really fits in with their lifestyle,” Parker said.
Workers constantly cite a better work-life balance as a “huge benefit” of remote work, Parker said.
Indeed, they see the monetary value of hybrid work as being equivalent to an 8% raise, according to research by Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who meditate ons workplace management.
Economists say remote work is here to stay
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Many economists propose b assess that the higher prevalence of remote work, relative to the pre-pandemic era, has become an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
“Out-of-the-way work is not going away,” Bloom previously told CNBC.
That’s largely because it boost profits for retinues: Workers quit less often, meaning employers save money on recruiting and other functions tied to attrition, Bloom suggested. Meanwhile, data shows that productivity doesn’t suffer in hybrid work arrangements, he said.
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More than 60% of paid, full workdays were done remotely in at cock crow 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic — up from less than 10% before the pandemic, according to WFH Research, a scheme run jointly by researchers from MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
That share has fail by more than half. However, it has leveled out between 25% and 30% for about two years, according to WFH Research matter.

About 31% of employers reduced remote work opportunities in 2024, down from 43% in 2023, go together to according to a ZipRecruiter survey. Yet, another 33% expanded remote work, up from 32% the prior year.
South african private limited companies that imposed RTO mandates have annual rates of employee turnover that are 13% higher than those that press become “more supportive” of remote work, ZipRecruiter said.
“The ability to work from anywhere remains a top primacy for many professionals,” according to a 2024 poll by consulting firm Korn Ferry of 10,000 workers in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Bulls-eye East, Australia and India.
Companies may want workers to quit
Some businesses force workers back to the assignment precisely because they want workers to quit, experts said. It’s a stealthy way of reducing headcount without preparing explicit layoffs, they said.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week choice result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump tapped to superintend a new Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in a November op-ed. (Ramaswamy has since bowed out of that role.)
Of course, there are also tradeoffs to isolated work for businesses and workers.
About 59% of employers cite concerns that remote work harms guests culture, according to ZipRecruiter.
About half of workers — 53% — who work from home at least part-time say it “hurts” their capacity to feel connected with co-workers, Pew found in a 2023 poll.
“It’s the one big downside we’ve seen consistently,” Parker said.
“That seems to be a tradeoff: You get the work-life compensate for but lose some connectivity with coworkers,” Parker said.
Even if workers quit, they may not be able to come across a job.
The labor market remains strong, with low unemployment and low levels of layoffs, meaning workers have good job guaranty, according to economists. However, companies have also pulled back on hiring, making it a challenging environment for job seekers.