Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Amid the deluge of executive orders that President Trump signed during his first week in office, is a mandate headlined return to in person work. The order applies to the executive branch and it calls for an end to remote work arrangements for government employees. But Trump isn't alone. From Washington to Wall Street, bosses are pushing for their workers to come back to the office full time, and everyone feels differently about it.
I have no problem with it whatsoever.
I definitely don't think that would work for me. Just two days a week is more than enough. On a weekday afternoon, we asked people around Midtown Manhattan about the work from home policies that many Americans got used to during the pandemic.
I love to cook at home and actually take a lunch break.
I'm a new dad, so it's a little challenging for me to spend that much time I'm away from my daughter. I don't want to wake up earlier. You got a wake up shower to the whole thing on somebody else's timeline.
That's not for me.
But with COVID era restrictions becoming a thing of the past. The terrain is starting to shift again.
I would have thought that the story would have died out by now, but it keeps coming out to grab people.
Heather Landy overseas Bloomberg's coverage of work and management.
I think a lot of people were hoping to come out of the pandemic with an answer, what is the right way to do this? And there was no one right answer.
In twenty twenty four, offices in the biggest US cities were still half empty compared to pre pandemic levels. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, three quarters of employed adults with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home at least some of the time. But by the end of the year, many major companies had instituted return to office policies, and it's raised some questions.
Is work from home slowly dying? What's behind the push to get people back to the office, and what does it mean for workers? I'm David Gera, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on the show. Are you listening to this episode on an office commute? Well, in twenty twenty five, more people maybe joining you. Heather Landy says, when you look at the numbers, it's clear why there's so much uncertainty around where we've landed on remote work. Companies are still pretty solidly split.
Based on an index that we follow here at Bloomberg Flexinc. They're Flex Jobs Index, about thirty two percent of companies are back in the office full time, so right, so that's about a third a little bit more than that, something like forty three percent or doing what we would call structured hybrid, and that might be back in the office two days a week, or three days a week, or four days a week, maybe it's on specific days
that everybody agrees to gather, maybe not. And then twenty five percent or so are fully flexible, where people really have a choice of where they want to be, and in that grouping, only like five percent is full time remote.
In the past year or so, many companies have made news with their return to office mandates, including some on Wall Street. In early January, the largest US bank, JP Morgan announced plans to bring its workforce more than three hundred thousand employees back to the office five days a week.
The JP Morgan announcement was funny for me because I had almost forgotten that they weren't back in that policy already. I think, given Jamie Diamond's long standing critique of remote work, it actually took rather long for the company itself to catch up policy wise to what he's been out saying publicly.
What did JP Morgan say was the rationale for making that decision pretty much.
Just that they think they're better together. It was not set in hard data, Nor was the big sort of watershed decision a few months ago by Amazon dot Com just a feeling amongst executives that this is the way we want things to work out.
But not all of JP Morgan's employees agree. The company disabled comments on its internal message board after backlash. In office mandates in corporate America have sometimes been clunky. Back in twenty twenty one, when COVID vaccines became widespread, safety and corporate mandates collided in people.
Were talking about needing to have better air filtration systems and plexiglass dividers between desks, having people come back to the office in stages or in small chunks so that we didn't overlap with one another and be too close for comfort. And then that quickly gave way to a more normalized take on return to office. But by that point people were so ensconced in their homes and at their dining room tables and in their living rooms it was difficult for a lot of people to imagine coming back.
And in that time, too, the technology got so much better and our comfort with the technology got so much better that the purpose of coming back was lost on a lot of people. Teams got more dispersed, global time zones became of a factor, and all of these different ways to work collaboratively but asynchronously is cropped up. The idea of coming into an office to sit on a zoom all day or to leave comments on a shared doc somewhere seemed problematic to a lot of people.
Today, companies are still trying to figure out if work from home works for them long term.
The issue is, you know, our companies actually using this freedom wisely and making considered choices about what works best for them, And it's not actually clear to me that that's the case. And I say that based on both personal experience and what the research is showing us.
Heather has experienced this firsthand. At a past job. The rule was you.
Could work from home six days per month. What a strange system, right, and when I was asked about why that was the policy, the answer was, well, it used to be four days a month, and people thought that was too little, so we made it six days a month.
I mean, that doesn't really feel like a research backed reason for the way that things were, and yet that's the way that a lot of companies have approached This is like sort of gut feel what feels right and basically how much can we push before our employees reject the situation altogether.
Since the pandemic, Heather has interviewed CEOs from many different sectors about what they've gained and lost switching to remote or hybrid work setups and almost across the board. She says work from home for business leaders has become kind of a boogeyman when it comes to how they think about productivity.
In a lot of cases, the recall of workers back to the office is happening right after a slump in the share price. CEOs seem to share this sort of nagging feeling in the back of their minds that they're just not getting what they should be getting out of the people who work for them, that we've somehow become
too soft as a society, Our workplaces. We've become more generous with things like parental leave, and we're not sure at the end of the day how to measure performance for many jobs, and so remote work where flexible work arrangements becomes an easy scapegoat for that.
What do we know about the difference between a worker's productivity working four days in the office versus five, Say.
So, the case studies that we have seen thus far, both sort of anecdotally and in terms of the academic literature, suggests that working from home makes people no less productive than they've been overall at the office.
And it's not so easy to demand all your employees report back to the office overnight after the break. We look at the way different industries are handling this and what that could mean for the US economy. An announcement from a bank like JP Morgan calling its employees back to the office full time isn't just an internal message, Bloomberg's Heather Landy tells me, it's also a sort of broadcast to the rest of the corporate world.
I think everybody still looking for Bellweathers and sort of influencers, and.
We're to see what others are doing.
Yeah, for both competitive reasons, and also because a lot of companies just haven't figured out the answer to that central question, which is what is the right arrangement for my workforce?
Because it's hard to measure the benefits of in person work, and it's even harder to measure the benefits a remote setup can offer employees, Heather says business leaders often point to the value of collaboration, learning, and mentorship when touting in person work, and the importance of policies that impact everyone equally. When some workers have to be in person and others have the luxury of staying home, it can
create a sense of haves and have nots. But many workers with computer jobs say they want autonomy, the ability to save time and money by eliminating a commute or multitasking chores during the day, perks like what Heather calls the roast chicken benefit.
Working from home. As a busy working parent, we're able to take a break from the laptop for ten minutes, prep a roast chicken, throw it in the oven, and while it was cooking, get right back to their laptops and finish off whatever projects they needed to finish off before they signed off for the day.
Heather what are these decisions tell us about the health of the economy. More broadly, I'm thinking of the labor market. There has to be a degree of confidence that a Jamie Diamond has that if he imposes a rule like this on the company, there's a tightness to the labor market that's going to keep people who don't want to work five days a week of the office are going to keep doing it.
Yeah, I mean, I think all along we've seen this sort of flip flopping in the power balance between workers andmployers. You know, we've had sort of mixed signals from our labor market here in the US. So unemployment is not terribly high, but job searches among job seekers are lengthening
and lengthening. And because of that, I think employers do feel, you know, if I issue at a blanket five day a week back in the office rule on the margins, if there are people who can't do that or refuse to comply with that, I will be able to replace them.
Returning to the office full time isn't just an adjustment for employees. Companies themselves have to adapt their infrastructure and their procedures so that they can once again have people in the office that's not always seamless. In December of twenty twenty four, Amazon delayed its return to office mandate and told personnel in at least seven cities that there wasn't enough physical space for everyone.
And a lot of the edicts that we've seen, if you read the memos that are going out to their staffers, which often become public in part because employees are making them public because of their dissatisfaction with the rules, a lot of them read a little bit like Swiss cheese. They're always sort of leaving the door open to exceptions, in part because the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring companies to make accommodations.
You're hinting at a level of dialogue. I mentioned some companies that can go from kind of dialogue to protestation. Have we seen anything like that?
Yeah. Absolutely. There was a sort of infamous zoom call last summer summer of twenty twenty four amongst corporate employees at Walmart after they were recalled to the office, and actually we saw one of their executives stepping down announcing her departure relatively recently, tied in part to that policy.
We've focused on companies that have brought workers back five days a week. Are there any marquee examples of a company that's gone in a different direction.
Yeah, So all State, the big insurance company. They have massively reduced their square footage and brought down their annual spend on corporate offices by over two hundred million dollars a year. So they have moved lots of people to flexible arrangements. They've sold their headquarters campus in the Chicago area, and they are allowing people to work from home and encouraging it, but also giving them ultimate flexibility by working with a company that's helping them arrange for flex spaces
in various cities all over the country. But they have said that they're committed to this flexible environment for a really sizable workforce.
Where do you think we are in this kind of indefinite evolution of what we're from home and return to office is like? And then picking up off of that, where do you think we're going to be in a year's time.
I think we are where we're going to be, which is to say, I think we're going to be sort of evenly split amongst companies that are fully flexible have structured hybrid and are in the office five days a week. By and large, there doesn't seem to me to be a compelling reason yet in terms of the research to say more companies should be doing.
It this way or that way.
So my guess is that they'll continue to sort of cast around a bit for what feels right, and that they'll end up in very different places.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Tracy Samuelson and Aaron Edwards. It was mixed and sound designed by Alex Sekura and fact checked by Audreana Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemster Boor. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever
you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.