The Economist: Remote work finds its rhythm - but at what social cost?

Key topicsRemote work has plateaued, with stable home-office days since 2023.Individualistic cultures embrace remote work more than collectivist ones.WFH boosts housing flexibility but may increase social isolation..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist .The backlash against remote work, when it came, was swift and fierce. After a post-pandemic honeymoon, when many companies flirted with the idea of letting staff work from home for ever, bosses began summoning employees back to the office. “I’ve had it with this…I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since covid and I come in and—where’s everybody else?” groused Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase, in leaked comments from a recent townhall at the bank.But five years on from 2020, when lockdowns shunted desk jockeys into home offices, remote work is enduring—despite the best efforts of Mr Dimon and his peers. Data from office-entry-swipes, phones and job postings suggest that, though more Americans are in the office than in 2020-22, their time in the workplace is no longer increasing much. A survey of 16,000 university graduates in 40 countries by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and colleagues, shared with The Economist, finds that the average respondent worked 1.3 days a week at home in late 2024 and early 2025, about the same as in 2023..The data also show an unexpected pattern. In this settled remote-work era it is those in the industrious Anglosphere who are most likely to work from their spare rooms (see chart 1). A college-educated Canadian clocks in 1.9 work-from-home days a week on average. The figure is similar for Britons, at 1.8, and a shade lower for Americans, at 1.6. By contrast, French and Danish workers spend around a day a week at home. Least enthusiastic of all about working from home are South Koreans, who average half a day out of the office.What explains this pattern? The type of industries in each country, their experience of the pandemic and wealth levels all play a role, in predictable ways. But the strongest single explanation concerns culture. Mr Bloom and co-authors find that the extent to which a society is individualistic or collectivist—as measured using an index developed by Geert Hofstede, a Dutch psychologist—best predicts a country’s embrace of remote work (see chart 2). Adopting the practice, or so the thinking goes, involves bosses trusting their workers, and therefore allowing them a degree of autonomy. Executives in more individualistic societies seem to be more comfortable loosening the leash and workers more comfortable working from home..The downsides of the shift are well-rehearsed. Evidence on employees’ productivity is mixed, with deleterious consequences for some roles. Mid-week golf has boomed over the past few years, according to research by Mr Bloom and Alex Finan, also of Stanford, that makes use of GPS tracking (see chart 3). Many share Mr Dimon’s worry that, “The young generation is being damaged.” They are being left behind, he said, in terms of meeting people and exchanging ideas. Remote work denies junior staff the chance to build relationships and learn by observing experienced colleagues..Read more:.Remote work sparks polarisation as employees resist, companies push back.Yet working from home has a number of underappreciated benefits. These are perhaps most obvious in the housing market. A longer commute is less of a chore if it only has to be endured three days a week, rather than five. As a consequence, people have started to take advantage of lower property prices by living farther from their work, in the process expanding the economic footprint of big cities. Home prices in the centre of America’s 20 largest settlements have risen by 13% on average since 2019, much less than the 30-50% growth seen in suburbs or further out (see map). The boom in housing costs after the pandemic was eye-watering; without remote work, the squeeze in big cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco would have been even more painful..Offices can also be smaller if workers are not in every day. That lets companies downsize and frees up space that could, in time, be used for housing. In practice, converting office buildings into flats is a notorious hassle: rearranging floorplans, plumbing, ventilation and more can cost $250-650 per square foot, according to CBRE, a commercial-real-estate firm. But these renovations are now happening at a record pace, especially in the costliest property markets where the eventual returns make the bother worthwhile.Beyond geography, working from home has also made everyday life more flexible. Without snooping bosses, staff are able to fit their work around the rest of their life more comfortably. Women with children, Mr Bloom’s cross-country survey finds, are appreciably more enthusiastic about remote working than those without. (The effect is smaller and, following hackneyed gender stereotypes, flipped for men.) Making parenting more compatible with professional life could, in the long run, perhaps nudge up birth rates. Unfortunately, the East Asian countries where fertility has fallen most steeply also tend to be the most sceptical about remote work..Even the mid-week golf boom may not be bad news, and not just because it is evidence of people enjoying their lives. From an economic perspective, letting golf courses (and gyms, tennis courts, shopping centres and so on) sit half-used throughout the working week is a highly inefficient way to sweat an asset. Moreover, America, the largest enthusiastic work-from-home economy, has seen strong productivity growth in recent years, which would be unlikely if staff were truly skiving rather than getting work done on the schedule that best suits them. Companies have a strong pecuniary incentive to settle on a rhythm that suits their needs, and many have plumped for a combination of remote and in-person work.Maybe, then, the true problem with working from home is not its economic impact, but its social one. Put simply, Americans do not seem to be making the most of the time they are no longer spending on their commute. Socialising and volunteering are both now less common than in 2019; meanwhile, people spend more time “relaxing” and playing video games. All told, the average American now spends half an hour longer alone than before covid. You may not want to spend every waking minute with your colleagues. But is it really better being by yourself?Before the pandemic, work-from-home rates had been rising steadily. On those trends, covid pulled its adoption forward by several decades. Now it has settled into a new groove—one that is more economically efficient, but also a little lonelier.

The Economist: Remote work finds its rhythm - but at what social cost?

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