The Journal. - The Data Is In on Work From Home

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

Six years after the pandemic, remote work has become a mainstay of the economy, with almost a quarter of work days taking place outside traditional offices. WSJ’s Owen Tucker-Smith explains how this has reshaped businesses, the economy and our work lives. And we hear from you about your love-hate relationship with working from home. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: - How an Influencer Built His Business, One Dog at a Time - How to Keep Up with AI At Work (Without Losing Your Mind) Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you team work from home or are you team return to office? Last week, we asked you all to share your thoughts, and we got so many responses. Hey there, Journal. My name is Michael. Hi, my name is Jane. Hi, I'm CR, long-time listener, first-time caller, etc. Some of you are very, very pro-remote work. I have been working remotely for the past. two years and I love it.

I can exercise. I can do my hobbies. You know, I can go and run an errand. I work probably 95% remotely. And I will say, I think my work life balance has never been better. If they ask me to go to an office, I will quit. But for others, there's a lot to love about the office. I am sick of fully remote work.

It bothered me not to have a consistent, group of people that I went into the office and we worked together and, you know, we were a team. Sometimes I kind of wonder, how would my life be if I were to work, like, in office? Would I get more exposure? Would I be able to get promoted, like, quicker? Would people, like, truly see my value? Sometimes when you're working remotely, it can feel like you're shouting into the void. But more than six years into this massive upheaval, what do we know about this big, accidental remote work experiment. Is it good, bad, somewhere in between? How has it reshape the economy, businesses, and our work lives? From the journal, this is work mode, a special series airing on

Sundays where we take a look at how work is changing. I'm Jessica Mendoza. Let's get to work. This episode is presented by SAP. Your company's ambitions can't be held back by long implementation, surprise costs, or empty AI promises. This SAP Grow AI Cloud ERP gets you live fast, keeps pricing predictable and delivers built-in AI that gets results the first day, not someday, all on a single platform that's easy to manage, industry-ready, and designed to scale with your business. Bring it with SAP Grow. AICloud ERP for any size business.

SAP.com slash grow. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. To understand the aftershocks of the remote work revolution, I called up a colleague.

My name is Owen Tucker Smith. I'm a reporter here. I cover the U.S. economy in all of its facets. Owen is 24 years old. So he's kind of a remote work native. So I am Gen Z, solidly Gen Z, and I graduated from high school in the spring of 2020, which, as I can all recall, was a moment. And I began, I began college online. My first full year of college was remote classes. So before I really had any strong opinions about remote. work I had, you know, experienced remote school, which I think sort of shaped my early views about it. And so nowadays, you know, I primarily work from the office, but we do have kind of a hybrid bottle here.

I asked Owen to break down some of the latest research on remote work. What is the general picture that the data on work from home paints? The general picture is that it has led to a massive shift. So first of all, it has shown that even six years after the pandemic, remote work has become a new normal. People are still working from home a lot. And it also shows that people really like to do that. When you look at the number of days that people work and how many of them are done at home, that number is around 26%. And so it's still more than a quarter of first.

Our hours worked, our remote hours. And when none of us convened the office, that number was very high. Over 60% according to Labor Department statistics. And as people started doing return to office mandates, it dropped. But then the interesting thing is it sort of stopped dropping. Over the last few years, it has sort of seemed to reach something that almost looks like a floor that we aren't going below, which sort of suggests. that remote work has become this kind of staple of the workplace for years to come unless there's a big

change. Right. It's kind of hit an equilibrium kind of thing. It's like this is where we're at about a quarter. Exactly. Still, a lot of corporate America is pushing for a return to office policy. Meta, Amazon, Fidelity, Target, Home Depot, among many others, have all required their workers to be three or more days back in the office. One of the biggest proponents of returning to the office, has been Jamie Diamond, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. Here's why it doesn't work in our business. That's Diamond speaking at Stanford University last year. As a management tool, when we meet it in the morning,

we talk, we have these debates. All day long we're talking. Hey, no, I check them to that. You're right about that. Here's what I think we should do. All day long, constant update, you know, constant share of information. So I tell you, it doesn't work in our business. Diamond's case is that remote work is bad for the economy

and says that it was leading to less focus and productivity at his bank. He and other corporate leaders also worried about the loss of office culture. And for culture, you talk about culture, it's impossible to do culture that way. And so, you know, for us, we made a decision. Culture was definitely a buzzword that a lot of these executives used to try to justify their return to office. That thing that makes our company work is that Geneseequa that we don't have when we're on or living, rooms. And there is now some research that does make that argument that when you don't have people in person, then they aren't connecting with each other as much and they aren't teaching

each other as much and they're not coordinating with each other as much. But that isn't good for the company. And for a lot of these executives, there was this stated understanding that when people work from home. They are less productive. And if you have people back in the office, you're going to have a more productive workforce and your company is going to create more output and have more revenue and make more of a profit. And the cycle continues. That was, you know, a big theory put out by corporate America. What does the most recent research say about productivity and work from home? There have been a number of studies on this. And one early study took a look at a specific civic company and found that when they were fully remote, they actually were a lot less productive.

They worked more hours, actually, but had less output and productivity dropped quite a bit. That's how some of you felt, like Ben Stocksdale, who found himself working fully remote back in 2022. I had to do that for four months, and it was the worst four months of my life. Having to talk with my clients remotely was just, just very frustrating. And while working from home is nice occasionally, I much prefer in-office work. I just find that I'm far more productive. Did the research say why people were working more hours, but were less productive? I think there's some idea that when people are working from home,

you might have a little bit more convenience, but you're almost blurring the boundary between work and home. So you can work at any hour of the day, whereas when you're in the office, When you leave traditionally, there's a little bit more of a, that's your work for the day. I'm done. That's it. Whereas you can be, once your living room becomes your office, any hour of the day can be your work day. But surprise, it's also more complicated than that. There was a very similar study about a different company that found the exact opposite, that remote work actually improved productivity amongst people in the company.

I know I personally love working remotely. That's Danny McCauley, who's been working from home since the pandemic. I know personally I get a lot more done as a remote work employee. I can stay focused. I can take quick breaks on my own accord and not necessarily when other people stop and possibly sort of interrupt the work that I'm doing. There's a whole school of thought that when people are remote,

especially if they're senior employees and they know what they're doing, there's just less in their way. They know what they're doing. They know how to do their job. And if you just let them do it without the distractions of an office, they'll be more productive. There's also a school of thought that when employees are at home, if that's what they prefer, then they're more satisfied. And having happy, satisfied employees is better for your business. But happy, satisfied employees are probably more productive employees, too. Exactly. Yeah. After the break, who is benefiting the most from remote work and who's losing out? Hear that? It's your money calling.

It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Offices don't have the best reputation. Office culture has been the butt of a lot of jokes over the last few decades. They've been made out to be soulless cubicle farms,

like those in the 1999 movie Office Space. I got to get out of here. I think I'm going to lose it. Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays. They can be filled with terrible bosses, like Michael Scott from the office. Remember when people used to say boss when they were describing something that was really cool. Like, those shoulder pads are really boss, man. Now boss is just slang for a jerk in charge. Some offices can even come off as dystopian, like in the TV show Severance.

So I'll never leave here. You'll leave at five. But it won't feel like it, not to this version of you anyway. I have no choice. Well, every time. you find yourself here, it's because you chose to come back. But despite pop culture's disdain for offices, many workers do want to go back, like Lindsay Wilson, a 27-year-old in Washington State. I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of just classic office culture that you see in TV shows from like the 2000s or all that sort of stuff. And it just feels like something that was kind of taken away from me in a way. I don't know. Lindsay's generation, Gen Z, is actually one of the biggest proponents of coming into the office.

Young people prefer to be in the office more than older people. There was a survey last year from Gallup that showed that Gen Z was actually the most opposed to fully remote work, which is sort of an interesting counterpoint to, I think, a notion that Gen Z, you know, doesn't want to work anymore, which you just hear a lot around the workplace. Here's what I think people get wrong about Gen Z and this whole office thing. That's Gia Patel, a 20-year-old student at Northeastern University in Boston. Go Huskies. I actually want to be in the office. What I actually want about being there is mentorship, you know?

Like actually watching someone do the job in real time and not just getting a message telling me what to do. I want someone to actually see how I work and catch stuff before it turns into a bad habit. I want real relationships with people, and not just a name that pops up in my calendar all week. And I think that's the part that people miss. I'm not choosing the office because I have to. I'm choosing it because honestly, it's the only way I feel like I'll actually learn anything. There's a lot of research now that says to train younger workers, you need to be constantly talking to them. They need to be seeing you do your job.

They need to be shadowing you. you need to correct their mistakes when they're early on in the process. And, you know, I talked to one employer who their office was remote, and when their young employees were at home, they would go on and do what he described as Rube Goldberg-esque solutions to very simple problems because you sort of let people just, you know, go on and on and on and on their own and there's nothing stopping them. They're kind of like reinventing the wheel for no reason. They're reinventing the wheel for no reason, because he wasn't there to see that they were going off and doing that. Right, to tell them, like, there's actually an established simple way of doing this.

You don't have to, like, start from zero. Exactly. What does that mean for their careers and Gen Z's ability to get hired? One of these studies that has gotten a lot of traction recently argues that there are fewer companies hiring young people since they've adopted remote work. that because they've encountered all these friction points, that they're just not hiring them as often. They say, well, when you decide to hire a young employee, you're making this bet that they're going to learn quickly

and that they're going to become valuable. And a lot of employers will say, the first six months of having a young employee, are they even really generating value for their company? They might be sucking up more resources than they are generating value because they're still learning. And that process takes so much longer when you're on Zoom. So why not just hire a senior employee who can do it better?

And that might be worth the extra money that you're spending on a higher salary. But what some of these economists worry is that if you're then hiring a lot fewer young people, then there's these scarring effects. Like there's this generation that isn't being taught and isn't being attended to, and a lot of them are unemployed and the consequences will snowball. Work from home might hold back Gen Z's careers, but for others, it's opened up job opportunities. We've seen an increase in workforce participation amongst certain groups because of it. There are huge pockets of the population for whom, you know, remote work has changed the calculus of whether or not they can work.

And in fact, there's studies showing that it has been a really empowering move for certain groups of people. For instance, there's one study that attributed the rise of remote work to many more Americans with disabilities being able to enter the workforce. It just wasn't something that felt realistic in the age where everyone had to be in the office from 9 to 5 every day. Another group that's benefited from remote work are parents, especially mothers with young children. Take Jamie McGee, a mom of two in Minneapolis. I really enjoy working from home. I enjoy the freedom. I have two small children and, you know, every morning is a race in and of itself without me

needing to get myself into an office, to pack a lunch, to remember my laptop, my charger, my AirPods, my water bottle. Taking that off the table allows for more time each morning to actually spend with my kids, you know, in more of a stress-free way, which I am so grateful for. and I definitely wouldn't trade that for anything. You know, one of these studies talks about, you know, the penalty tax of having a kid and how there is this big gap in employment rates between women who have kids and women who don't

and how that was shrinking at these companies where remote work was prevalent. And so if that continues to happen across the economy as remote work continues to be a big part of the workforce, then that's going to be very consequential for who works and how many women are in the office, et cetera. What about for maybe the more ambitious people in our audience? Is work from home harmful if you want to climb the career ladder or ask for raises?

Is there any difference between pay in work from home employees versus in office ones? There's definitely a sense that you are taking a pay cut if you only want to work from home. And in fact, there have been studies about, you know, people considering two job offers. And one is remote and one is in person. And what amount of money are you willing to accept for each? And people who really want to work from home will sometimes take like a 25% pay cut to their salaries. Isaac Cordova in San Antonio, Texas, has turned down higher-paying jobs so he can continue working remotely. He has two preschool daughters, and working from home means saving on daycare.

I've rejected other opportunities. I had an option to go where they would pay me about $60,000 more, but in a different city. But I said no, because I wanted to stay home here with the girls. I'm able to do a lot of things around the house, clean up, pick up around here and there, dishes. laundry, and it all goes back to being able to spend some time here at home with my two girls and my wife. So to me, being able to work remotely, this amount of time has been such a great privilege and opportunity. So there's no doubt remote work can really, well, work for some groups of people. But it's worth noting at least one potential downside. It's negative impact on mental health. There's also an argument to be made that there are people losing out from the rise of

remote work because it has been detrimental to their emotional states. So early on, a big argument has been that remote work is good for employee satisfaction. People like working remote. They like being able to maybe be closer to their family or they like being able to be with their kids or they just like being able to do their laundry in the middle of the day. But over time, that may be having detrimental effects. And so one study that's come out recently and gotten a lot of attention argues that remote work accounts for like a significant proportion of the levels of isolation and loneliness that people feel these days. Right. It's also like, you know, a lot of people, especially when they're young, meet new friends and make community at the office.

you have something automatically in common with people you work with, which is your job. And if you're not seeing them in person or if they're far away from you, it's really hard to build those relationships. You're not going out with them in the same way. Whereas if you already have a community, whether it's family, whether you're already old enough to have your own friend group or whatever, the job and the social aspect of the job doesn't seem as important. Absolutely. And I mean, just as a young person, I have a lot of friends who work remotely. And even if they do have a built-out social circle, it's hard when, you know, if you were working from your home for the whole day, I hear a lot of them say, like, I need to have plans tonight. Like I haven't talked to anybody.

Otherwise, I'll go 24 hours and I won't hear the sound of my own voice. And that's weird. Well, Owen, you have all of this data and all of these studies in your head now after doing all this reporting. What do you make of all of it? It's hard. I mean, when you see so many conflicting opinions and studies, it's just hard to know what to think of it. There was a lot of sort of consensus shortly after the pandemic that remote work was this real benefit to productivity and employee happiness and society. And so it's interesting to just see research now making that like a little bit muddier. but if a whole generation of young people are struggling to get their careers off the ground because of this,

maybe we're going to feel differently about it in 10 years. But I think another sort of like elephant in the room is the emergence of hybrid work. I think there's a case to be made that that is really the future and that that's that kind of equal Airbnb that we've reached. According to one survey, more than half of jobs that are capable of being hybrid are. And based on your messages to us, a lot of you feel like it's a solid compromise. I feel really fortunate to have a hybrid role. I prefer working a hybrid over working fully remote. Honestly, if I worked fully remote, I don't think I would be as productive.

It's a priority to have this work-life balance while still maintaining the value of an office culture. It's really just about having the best of both worlds. Having both is really really win-win. Where do you stand on this spectrum? You know, I think I've drifted a little bit more in the direction of anti-remote work, which is interesting because it wasn't necessarily how I felt going in, but just being a member of Gen Z and starting to look at this research has complicated that. And so I think there'll be, there are many more years for my mind to be drifted in both directions

all the time and it changes every day. Work Mode is a series from The Journal, a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Justin Layhart. This episode was produced by Enrique Perez-Delrosa and edited by Catherine Brewer. I'm Jessica Mendoza. We'll be back next Sunday with our next episode of the series. Until then, have an amazing week. And remember to talk to a human today.